image courtesy of Smath.

Like most people, my mind meanders much of the time. I find myself starting a task with great aplomb but soon I lose focus and end up daydreaming, dicking around on the internet, and otherwise wasting time. This is especially pronounced in my job-free life, where it is up to me to structure my own time and pursue my own goals. I haven’t done terribly at this, but I also haven’t done as much as I know I’m capable of, or even as much as I want to do.

I successfully changed several of my bad habits a few years ago, but, over time, I found myself retreating back into those old patterns. I learned once again that inertia is powerful, the ruts in our brains are deep, and gains, if not protected, can soon be lost. In the last few months, even my physical well-being has suffered from the lazy choices I was making. I felt low-grade fatigue and nausea many days, and dragging myself through even the bare minimum tasks required took what seemed like an inordinate amount of effort. Was I depressed? No, I don’t think so. I was just feeling lost, lacking even a compelling reason or the energy to get found.

So I signed up for a spiritual retreat in the Rocky Mountains hoping to jump those entrenched tracks, get my head straight, and make some space for something new to emerge. The annual Being and Becoming Retreat takes place in two parts: being is all about practicing what it’s like to take a liberated position to life, and becoming is about operating from that position in conjunction with others. I decided that I needed to start at the beginning, and so signed up for the Being half.

Sitting on a cushion without moving for 10 days is not as easy as it sounds, but ultimately it was incredibly rewarding. Our instructions were simple: let everything go and have no relationship to whatever arose in our consciousness, from beloved songs to brilliant ideas to back pain. Most importantly, our teacher told us, don’t give up. Keep making noble effort.

This phrase, “noble effort,” really stood out for me. Trying is one thing; making noble effort is another. It puts a higher and deeper value on our struggles, and makes continued exertion feel, in and of itself, worthwhile. As I sat hour after hour, I put everything I had into the act of meditation. Some hours were easy and some were torturous. But the fact that I kept at it, even in the face of terror and distraction and physical pain, made me feel proud and capable. It also led to beautiful moments when I was freed from the small position I usually operate from, and got to experience what it feels like to be truly liberated from the past and future, alive and awake in the present moment.

I noticed that, as I exerted my will, I felt lighter, more positive, happier. I wanted to sing and dance all the way back to Pittsburgh, and visions of what’s possible came streaking through my imagination like glittering comets. I had meditated before, and had lovely experiences of space and freedom and expansion. But what was a new realization for me was that all this good stuff comes simply from continued trying. “Noble effort is the most sacred thing in the world,” our teacher said, and I felt a wall in me crumble.

Being a member of Generation X, perhaps the most cynical crew ever to walk this good green earth, I sometimes saw my desire for a better me and a better culture as something shameful. “You talk such a good game,” I would tell myself, “about wanting to be a new kind of person creating new ways to live and relate. And yet look at you, doing the same stupid shit you’ve been doing for 20 years! You are full of it!” You can guess where this train of thought led—straight back into silliness, laziness, and despair.

But Andrew’s words flipped that around for me. Yes, I have inertia and karma and bad habits to overcome, and no, I will not always be successful in my attempts to do so. But to allow momentarily failures to become a rationale to quit trying is insanity. Noble effort is sacred. Instead of twisting my utopian impulses into a reason for self-doubt, I need to treasure them, cultivate them, and encourage them.

Since the retreat, it’s funny—my life is pretty much the same, but it feels different, too. The ideas I am working on—this blog, Bright Green Burgh, a new handmade business, a band—haven’t fundamentally changed, but my position to them has. All will require lots of work, lots of effort, but I’m not scared of that anymore. What’s important is that I keep pouring myself into what seems right.

Last night I was reading Gretchen Rubin’s lovely book The Happiness Project, and she takes on this concept of noble effort in a more secular way. She has to try hard to keep her resolutions, but she finds that the effort it takes is more than worth it; that the harder she tries, the more success she has, and the happier she and her family become. One thing Rubin excels at is peppering her own work with thoughtful and well-placed quotes from others, and one in particular stood out to me, from William Butler Yeats: “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this this nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”

It seems obvious to say that growth and effort are inextricably linked, that effort leads to growth and growth requires effort, but deep in my heart, I have difficulty believing it. Cynicism and distrust are so embedded in me, it’s almost like they are my default operating system. And while it’s true that many try and try and try and still fail, and I may be among them, it’s also true that failure in and of itself can lead to growth, if it’s thought of in the right way, as discovery and a step on a path rather than a dead end.

This rings true in my own little personal life; the more effort I expend, and the more I can see problems as opportunities to learn rather than wellsprings of drama, the more I am able to keep doing what needs to be done. It seems to hold true on a bigger scale, too. Can we look at our time in history as simply where we are rather than entrenched and unsolvable and the result of a fundamental flaw in who we are? Can we see ourselves with compassion AND hold ourselves to a higher standard, as we would a growing child? Can we encourage what’s good while pruning what’s bad? Can we cultivate our nobler impulses rather than shitting on them?

After 10 days of letting it all go, I’m ready to put everything I have into maintaining this position of freedom so that I can whole-heartedly participate in the development we need to do. The fact that making noble effort brings happiness, too, is just the icing on the cake.

image courtesy of .candy

“We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game by taking sides .... No one who has read a page by a good critic or a speculative scientist can ever again think that this barren choice of yes or no is all that the mind offers.”

—Jacob Bronowski, host and author of The Ascent of Man, physicist/philosopher, and all around smart guy

I came across this quote in the book “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food,” written by an organic farmer and a genetic engineer who are married to each other and who wonder how their disciplines might be married for the good of both humankind and nature.

Both the question they are asking in their book and the content of this quote are fascinating. How often do we settle for the barren choice of yes or no, even when reality itself teems with untold possibilities? And how often do we make that barren choice unconsciously?

The answer: Pretty much all the time. From politics to the economy to the environment, we generally turn the content of our discussions into a horse race in which the most important thing is whether or not “our” horse wins.

I know that a good deal of my life tends to resemble a game of “Hotter, Colder,” where I move toward and away from individual people, events, activities, and ideas based on my feelings and beliefs, without really considering the landscape as a whole. Republican bad—move away. Organic good—move toward.

But I’m coming to understand the extent to which “my feelings and beliefs” are conditioned and inaccurate. Reality itself is far more complex and nuanced than what my feelings and beliefs can handle. It requires and deserves more than knee-jerk reaction.

Up till now, we are pretty much asked to choose a side. Are you liberal, progressive, fundamentalist, neo-con? Fiscal conservative/social liberal? Hippie? Businessperson? Organic or engineered? In each case, making a choice excludes the other choices, and warfare tends to ensue (i.e., the ongoing health care “debate”).

But it’s becoming clearer every day that we can’t continue to rely on these ideological categories. The world doesn’t ask many yes or no questions. Oftentimes, both yes and no are correct answers, depending on the context. So how do we literally expand our cognitive bandwidth to take in more of what is, so we can make more mature and relevant and useful decisions?

Integral theory (PDF) gives us a context for moving beyond the barrenness of the knee jerk horse race; it starts from the supposition that every perspective is valuable and contains a partial truth, and that much can be learned from developing our ability to shift and discern between perspectives.

This is a huge and new development in the human psyche. For most of our history, other points of view were largely unavailable to us. Even now in the information age, the paradigm is to choose one viewpoint and stick with it. In the process we end up ignoring, devaluing, and/or rejecting the wisdom embedded in other perspectives. By contrast, when we choose an integral approach, we are able to cherry pick the best of every ideological stance and engineer different intelligences into new solutions.

If we want to change the way the world works, this is an incredibly important skill to develop. Not only does it help us craft our arguments in a way that will resonate with a wider variety of people; it also helps us to leverage a variety of “good sense” in our efforts to evolve past the problems we’re facing.

Every perspective—liberal elite, fundamentalist Christian, organic farmer, genetic engineer, even Dick Cheney—has some truth in it. If we want to move past the barren, binary choice of yes or no, we need to listen to each other carefully and mine the genius of other perspectives.

As soon as I moved back to Pittsburgh in February, we got an enormous amount of snow that ground the city to a halt, and I was stuck at home for a few weeks. This was OK, cause I had a lot of painting and unpacking and rearranging to do. That was all done within a month, around the time the snow started to melt. Then I went to Colorado for a week to attend the (very awesome) Integral Incubator at Boulder Integral. I came back with my sails full of wind, ready to start my new blog and activist project, Bright Green Burgh, dedicated to creating a future for Pittsburgh that is both bright and green.

My first BGB act was to speak at a really fun event last weekend, put on by dear friend/professional bellydancer/community-builder extraordinaire Amethyst Azhar, where local artists created bellydance costumes out of recycled stuff. I was excited to talk to a bunch of environmentalist-leaning folks in such a merry atmosphere, hoping to connect with some and start to build a team. And I worked hard on what I would say—practiced it and clocked it and edited it and practiced some more.

By the time I got to the event, I felt ready. But I was in the middle of a conversation with a fellow speaker when heard my name being called, and I hurried to the mike. And then, as my demure friend Matt likes to say, I shit the bed.

Instead of my beautifully crafted 9 minute speech, I rambled semi-coherently for about 3 minutes, leaving out the meat of what I had meant to say. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath, and I could tell I wasn’t connecting with the audience; I wasn’t even getting my message out. In the heat of the moment, I elected to just get the hell off stage.

Funny thing, though—somehow, I didn’t feel awful or hang my head in defeat as I would’ve expected myself to do. Nope, I was able to see clearly where I’d gone wrong and use that information to prepare myself better for the next time. Here’s some of the stuff I figured out.

• I can’t read from a page—too many variables have to be in place for that to work (lighting, a place to lay pages down, etc.). I need to be able to speak just from a list of key points to address.
• Before I get up there, I need to take a few minutes to breathe and focus on what I want to convey, and I have to pay close attention to what’s going on in the program. I cannot be surprised to hear my name being called!
• Saying what I mean to say is far more important than how I wordsmith my message.
• People in an audience want to connect with me when I’m speaking. They want to be illuminated and inspired and educated. They are probably not looking for stuff to judge.

Of course I knew all this before Saturday night, but I didn’t act on it—apparently I needed to be reminded, and I guess that’s worth an uncomfortable couple of minutes.

To be honest, I was surprised that I wasn’t more decimated by the gap between what I wanted to happen, and what actually happened. I guess all this talk of having a developmental point of view has actually seeped into my skull at long last. I know that this suckage will bear fruit the next time I speak—hopefully I will suck a little less!

image courtesy of Victor Bezrukov

Over the weekend, I finally got around to reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver’s book about her family’s quest to eat locally, growing most of their own food and eating with the seasons.

What a great read—I tell you, that woman can really write about a vegetable! I loved reading about the joys and pains of gardening, the hard work of preserving food, and the satisfaction of seeing dozens of mason jars sparkling like jewels in the pantry at the end of autumn. I’m more excited than ever to work on my own little garden here in the ‘hood in Pittsburgh.

Kingsolver also spends a good portion of her book describing what is wrong with the food system in America. These ills have been well covered in the last several years—see Food Inc., Fast Food Nation, and most of Michael Pollan’s work. Our agricultural system is rather insane, and we have a lot of work to do to make it rational and sustainable.

But in Kingsolver’s work, and in that of many other writers and activists, there is something that bothers me: a confusion between technology and how it is used. She spends a good amount of time cataloging the evils of genetically engineered food, specifically going after Monsanto and showing how their practices limit choices and profits for small farmers, driving many of them out of business.

I wonder, though—is genetic engineering inherently such a terrible thing? Or is the problem that Monsanto is an unethical and short-sighted company?

There are people out there doing amazing things with genetic engineering, people who are motivated by a desire to prevent children from going blind and poor farmers from losing their crops in floods. In fact, human beings have been engineering plants and animals for thousands of years, resulting in unprecedented levels of health, education, and prosperity for more people than ever before in our history. Clearly, it’s possible that genetic engineering can do some good in the world. In fact, it already has.

This is just one example of our tendency to confuse tools with those who use them. Obviously, technology can be and has been used for good and not so good ends. Witness the internet’s explosion of information-sharing and multi-national scamming. Or the ability of cell phones to keep us in touch and cause us to crash our cars. Heck, even the humble automobile brings amazing benefits to humanity even as it causes sprawl and pollutes the atmosphere.

But this doesn’t mean that the internet, cell phones, or cars are inherently evil. It just means that we are not using them consciously and purposefully to improve our lives and our world.

This is the meat of the issue that we must address and overcome—our own decision-making processes. When we use a new technology, what are we using it for? Are we trying to get vitamins into children, or are we trying to dominate the marketplace?

In Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand says that when we resist new technologies wholesale, we miss a huge opportunity to shape them. Why should we leave something as powerful as genetic engineering up to a company that clearly doesn’t have humanity’s best interests at heart? A better approach, he says, is to learn everything we can about emerging tools and get involved with developing them and infusing them with our values.

Look at Wal-Mart, whose innovative technology of cheap sourcing from around the world and cheap selling at home has made it one of the progressive movement’s favorite enemies. Because many dedicated people chose to engage with this beast rather than just resist it, Wal-Mart now carries organic and local foods, sells hormone-free milk, and requires its suppliers to use far less packaging than they did in the past. Soon they will implement green ratings for every product they sell, taking greenhouse gasses, water usage, and supply chain information into account.

Of course, Wal-Mart is only responding to their customers’ requests and making money in the process—their motives are hardly altruistic. But I don’t doubt that at least some of the people responsible for the company’s greening process want to make a positive difference in the world, and they have expended massive effort to show that doing good can also be good business. In doing so, they’ve started to change the course of the biggest retailer in the world.

This kind of bridge-building is the method by which we will make the leap into a zero-emissions, innovation-driven future. Instead of raising flags against tools we don’t like, we must find the courage to engage with them, inject them with our values, and use them with consciousness.

We can’t leave potentially harmful technologies to those who are interested in money more than anything else—to do so is an abdication of our responsibility as principled people. More importantly, in the tension between the forward march of technology and resistance to it, the resisters never win. Instead let’s get in there, get our hands dirty, and shape our future.

image courtesy of mikebaird

Most of the time, for most of us, life seems pretty consistent. Work, family, and home life may vary from day to day, but for the most part, things chug along remarkable steadiness. Then something happens—a job loss, an illness, a new opportunity—and we realize how tenuous our security really is. No one ever really knows what our lives will look like in a year, but we think we do.

Since I lost my job, I’ve seen how strong this self-delusion of security can be. In reality, there’s no less certainty in my life than there was a few months ago, but it feels like there is. The challenge is the same as it always has been—to be OK with uncertainty, to connect with the possibility inherent in it and not freak out.

This idea figures prominently in Whole Earth Discipline, the new book by Whole Earth Catalog and Long Now Foundation founder Stewart Brand. In it, Brand has a ball tearing into some of environmentalism’s most sacred cows—urbanization, overpopulation, nuclear energy, and genetic engineering. The science he cites and the stories he tells are compelling to say the least, but what strikes me most in his argument is how he looks at things—from a position of not knowing, having his own ideas but being more than willing to change them as new evidence and explanations arise.

Brand addresses this viewpoint head on, and urges environmentalists to approach research and technology without prejudice or pre-conditioned responses. He wants us to stop being hedgehogs and start being foxes.

What’s the difference? Hedgehogs have one stance and they stick with it in all situations—whether they are being attacked by a predator or observed by a child, the spines come out. Foxes, on the other hand, adapt their behavior depending on what works. They experiment and evaluate and adjust. This ability to read current conditions and adapt makes them effective.

The foxy approach makes good sense—of course we should always have another look at our conclusions when we take in new information. But in practice, most of us are much more comfortable sticking with the hedgehog strategy. We make up our minds on an issue and we never reconsider it again. We look at people who change their minds or their course as weak-willed and lacking in conviction. We even mock our policy-makers—people who should frequently be changing their minds based on the data—for being flip-floppers. We say we value change and innovation, and we do, but only after it’s proven right. Though we live in a world that demands foxiness, most of us cling to our hedgehoggy ways.

The problem with this rigid approach is obvious—it stifles growth. If adherence to ideology is more important than empirical testing and iterative development, then it’s not possible for anything to change. We end up with a highly polarized debate in which nothing is actually debated; talking points are merely spoken and then shouted with increasing vehemence. When we adhere to our pre-conceived ideas, we make the mistake of assuming that what’s important is our ideological consistency rather than our effectiveness.

At this point, most of us are still hedgehogs. We like knowing what our response will be to any question. We like feeling as though our worldview is “all done.”

But the truth is that when we value ideological consistency over practicality, we stagnate. Our simple, preconfigured ideas are not equal to the challenges facing us. We need to let go of our fundamentalism, allow ourselves to be unsure of the next step, to stray from the familiar path in pursuit of our goal, which is nothing less audacious than the transformation of our our whole way of living.

This orientation to life feels unsteady at first, but it is possible to get your sea legs with practice. My first day of unemployment felt like staring into the gaping maw of the void itself, but I’m getting more fluent in the unknown every day. My old way of maintaining security by having a lucrative though passionless job worked for a long time, but it’s not cutting it anymore. Neither is our typical picture of what it means to be an environmentalist. We need a new strategy, a foxier one, based less on what we think environmentalism is about and more on what actually works.

In this short talk, Derrick Jensen imagines what Star Wars would look like if written by environmentalists—would they file lawsuits against the Empire ... sell free-trade coffee to its citizens ... sign petitions against Darth Vader?

Now, it is a bit simplistic to characterize the messy real world of 2010 as the evil Galactic Empire. And of course I believe more in redemption/building on what is than revolution/blowing shit up. But he is right about one thing: most of us who want to change the world are thinking far too small.

I don’t say this to diss tiny choices. The decisions that we make to carry our own water and bags, eat better quality food, recycle more—all this stuff is significant. The drops in the bucket do add up, and, even more important, mindful action increases our capacity for more mindful action. Changing from the inside out is natural.

But if we see going green as no more than a collection of lifestyle changes, we’re focusing on the trees to the detriment of the forests (and oceans, and mountains).

Each of us exists in the center of a series of nested circles. The smallest one is me, my body, my day-to-day routine. Then the circles get bigger and overlap—personal relationships, communities, industries, and finally the whole world. We could debate whether spirituality is be a dot at the center or the unseeable edge of the page ... maybe both!

Anyhow, when we make changes, we tend to start with the innermost circle because that’s the sensible thing to do. We rethink our ideas and alter our daily habits. But stopping here won’t cut it. If we content ourselves with changes in the “me” circle, then—forgive my geekery!—but we’re like Jensen’s ineffectual rebels demanding sensitivity training for Stormtroopers while Alderaan burns. We need solutions in all the circles, even the big scary ones. Especially the big scary ones. Here are a few examples of wider-circle ideas:

• Worldchanging founder Alex Steffen recently challenged Seattle to become the world’s first carbon-neutral city. Citizens are already debating what that means and how to get there.
• Dawn Danby is updating one of the major tools of her trade—Autodesk—to help architects and designers make greener decisions throughout the design process.
• John Fetterman, mayor of Braddock, PA, and his team are working to create jobs and community in the ashes of what was once a bustling town just outside of Pittsburgh. They are in it for the long haul, but so far there’s already an urban farm, a bio-diesel company, and a growing artist community taking shape.

Of course, massive worldchanging ideas don’t conk us on the head all the time. We can’t snap our fingers and become genius politicians and architects and scientists. But!—we can think bigger today than we did yesterday.

And there are a lot of ways this can play out. Maybe you dream up an idea to push your business in a greener direction, or you consolidate all the smart technologies in your niche to make them more accessible to everyone else. Maybe you share an amazing idea with an important person in a passionate way, or you start a group to bring players together behind a unified vision. Maybe an apple falls and you figure out cold fusion. Who knows? The point is to be aware, to look for opportunities to impact every circle you’re a part of.

Thinking big isn’t something that we do all the time. We’re not used to taking a stand for something publicly, and it’s easy to feel impotent as the circles get wider and less familiar. It’s a stretch, and stretching can be painful, though it usually ends up being in that “hurts so good” kind of way. Thinking bigger than what we’re used to causes us to grow into the kind of people who can solve bigger problems and implement bigger ideas. And that’s exactly what the world needs us to become.

And there is this upside: thinking big is a lot more fun than thinking small. Dunno about you but I get way more excited to work on something with unknown-but-possibly-huge potential than I do to tinker with my own habits. Not that my own habits aren’t important—they certainly are!—but they are not the only or even the most important thing.

My goal for 2010 is to constantly be thinking about how to play for bigger stakes, how to connect more brilliant people for maximum impact, and how to leverage everything I’ve got to bring about the changes I want to see.

What’s yours? Pump it up and make it big and tell us all about it!

(spirograph image courtesy of chefranden)

image courtesy of petter palander

When you walk into a room, how do you position yourself?

I tend to evaluate who’s there and take one of two stances: superior or inferior. Either I’m better/smarter/cooler or I’m dumber/lamer/less experienced. And once I assume one of these positions, it’s damn near impossible to snap out of it.

If I perceive myself as better, then it becomes all about making sure everyone knows that I’m better—that my point of view is more comprehensive and impressive than theirs. If I put myself in a position of being less than, then I clam up like a shy little kid, barely even giving myself permission to speak for fear of looking like a nimrod.

I can see that this behavior is arrogant and immature, that it reflects an inaccurate understanding of reality. Is it true, or at all important, that I am smart or dumb, more than or less than? Isn’t it far more important that I show up in every situation ready to contribute something positive no matter who else is around?

This superiority/inferiority complex also limits my ability to participate and lead and create with other people. How can I be fully part of something big and awesome and world-changing when I insist on setting myself apart from every situation in which I find myself?

I am not going to be able to create the bright green future I envision on my own. I need to work in close and free-flowing collaboration with the many other brilliant people who believe in these possibilities. I can’t be overbearing, nor can I limit what I have to offer by shying away from those who are more accomplished than me. I have to learn how to not have it be about me at all.

Why do I evaluate every situation according to how I fit into it? Some mundane combination of childhood habits and murky psychological power plays, no doubt. But at this point, I don’t even think the “why” matters. What matters is the fact that I really want to change it.

It’s tricky, because, although I can see this pattern in myself after the fact, in the moment it doesn’t feel like something I’m actively doing. It’s pre-cognitive, a habit so deeply ingrained that I have a hard time noticing that it’s happening. So I think my first step must be to pay attention to what I am thinking, to look for that moment when I make a movement away from the group, and to resist that urge.

I doubt that I’m the only person who does this—in fact I see other people do it every day. We are hesitant to trust each other, afraid we might look stupid or be misunderstood or lumped in with a crowd that doesn’t reflect how we think about ourselves at all.

So we set ourselves apart by judging instead of coming together. Millions of us walk around positioning ourselves in relationship to each other without actually being in relationship with each other. What a colossal waste of time and potential!!

What might be possible if we each made the commitment to prioritize connection over looking good? If we decided to lay aside our ideas about who we are individually and instead discover what we can do together?

image courtesy of zoonabar

A few weeks ago, I found out that I’m being downsized from the company I work for. I haven’t written since then, because I haven’t been sure what to say.

It’s been 15 years since I graduated from college, and for most of those years I’ve been working in a narrow niche of software development for the printing and publishing industries. What I’ve learned in that time is immense. From a childhood of chaos and poverty, this career enabled me to create a stable financial life. I’ve learned how to complete complicated projects, hang tough in challenging situations, and work with a wide variety of people.

At the same time, coming out of a meeting last week, I realized that I had just spent an hour going into minute details about things that mean absolutely nothing in the big picture. I’m not one to linger on regrets ... but I do feel some sadness that I’ve devoted so much of my life to work that I don’t particularly care about.

At this point, there are many possible roads I can take. I can take a job right now doing pretty much the same thing that I’ve been doing for 15 years. I can look for something new. Or I can take the time I have and focus on breaking through my own blocks so that I can wholeheartedly participate in creating the awesome future I see in my mind’s eye.

For maybe the first time in my life, I have a great deal of empty space. The challenge is for me to resist the urge to fritter it away, to make good use of it. The challenge is, as always, to grow.

The frontier of growth is about embodying my ideals more and more deeply—honestly facing the ways in which don’t live in accordance with what I say I believe. I’ve done a lot of work, and I’ve come a long way, but I still have so much cynicism, arrogance, insecurity and uncertainty to overcome.

Part of me wants to take the easiest possible road and jump into a new job just like the old one. To sit back and provide color commentary on what’s happening instead of jumping in and playing. That part of me still sees my journey as entirely my own, unrelated and not beholden to anything larger than myself.

But there’s another part of me, a braver part, that sees all the incredible possibilities in where I’m at right now. This is the part I’m putting my attention on.

Have you been through a life-changing situation like this? How did it impact you? How did you use it to develop? I would love to hear your story as I sketch in the lines of my new life and work on a plan to flesh it out ...

image courtesy of billolen

I spent a few hours at the American Museum of Natural History yesterday, and between marveling at the gemstones and beautifully illustrative dioramas, I visited the exhibit on evolution. I saw models of wee furry people, skulls of multiple sizes, and a clear and detailed explanation of heredity. And in one of the videos, I heard a sentence that got me thinking:

Without evolution, biology would simply be little more than a kind of natural history stamp collecting.

I’d never really considered this before, but it struck me as both true and perfectly obvious once I’d heard it. Without a bigger story to infuse bits of knowledge and experience with a plot, there is no meaning to anything we do. There may be enjoyment in the moment, but if there’s no framework, there’s no sense of filling out a picture or advancing a cause. There’s just collection and consumption.

In the past, external forces provided this framework. Organized traditional religion told us to do good in the here and now to be rewarded later. Western individualism sprang from the Enlightenment and gave a different meaning to life: humans were meant to control nature and enjoy unending material wealth, so all of our hard work meant pushing forward into a new future.

But many of us no longer identify with traditional religion. Nor do we buy the notion that we are here simply to learn how to dominate nature and experience comfort. Our frameworks have been shattered, and many of us live lives in which the details add up to not much.

At this point in our history, we need to think about what our new framework of meaning will be. What is the picture we are filling out? From what skeleton of values do we wish to hang our future?

When we answer these questions, then the minutes that make up the hours and days and years of our lives can mean more, can point us in a direction with intention, can be made sense of as a whole story, rather than a collection of moments.

What is your framework? Are you collecting or building?

image courtesy of sektordua

Have you ever had an epiphany, decided to make a change, and then forgot about it within a matter of days? We’ve all gone through this process, and it makes sense because it’s largely how development happens. You make a breakthrough, and suddenly you’re in a new world. Or, more accurately, you have developed the ability to see things anew.

But the old way of seeing is still what you are used to, and gradually or suddenly your eyes lose their newfangled focus, and the world is old again, and you wonder whether your epiphany meant anything at all.

What happened is this: something new did emerge in you, but it wasn’t stable. This is how development occurs—in fits and starts, a messy progression of two steps forward and one step back. We go through 4 major stages in the learning process:

• Unconscious incompetence, where we don’t even know what we don’t know.
• Conscious incompetence, where we are starting to see the extent of what we don’t know. This part can be very painful!
• Conscious competence, where we’re starting to get it but it requires a lot of effort.
• Unconscious competence, where we’re so good at our new skill that we can sink into performing it, without having to think about it.

It’s like when you learned to swim, you paddled once or twice then screamed for your dad to hold you. Gradually, with help, you gained confidence in your ability to swim in new waters. But you couldn’t have expected to just jump in and do it perfectly the first time. You needed time and effort and help to stabilize it, to get over the painful hump of conscious incompetence to conscious competence.

This process applies to everything from financial skills to nutrition to spiritual development. We need courage to take our first steps, and then we need help to get through the awkward stage.

I know for me this external support is crucial. Without the exercise group I’m a part of, I would never have developed the habit of working out 5 hours a week. If not for community with other practitioners of Evolutionary Enlightenment, I would not be able to keep at it. Even simple education works much better in a group—I can read a book on my own, but I understand it much more deeply when I get a chance to talk about it with others.

It’s gotten to the point that when I’m struggling with something, I look for a way to bring other people into it. For instance, I have been seriously slacking on my meditation practice, and when I slack on that, everything suffers. So recently I joined together with some friends who are also working on their daily practice, and we made the commitment to each other to check in and care about what we are all doing.

At some point I will be strong enough to meditate daily without relying on anyone else’s support. But, for now, knowing that other people are part of what I’m trying to do has gotten me through more than a week with no missed sessions.

What are you working on? Can you see a way to bring your community into it so that you all benefit?

image courtesy of Mi Gi

If you’re reading this site, it’s probably because you care about the state of the world. You also recognize that the problems we have to solve are fairly intractable from the level we are at right now, and so you want to push yourself to be smarter, more comprehensive in your thinking, and more powerful in your actions.

If you’re anything like me, though, sometimes this cognitive recognition that we need to keep developing slips away a bit. After a long tiring day at work, the couch sings its siren song, and the laziness to which our culture says we are entitled takes over more hours than we’d like to admit. In the midst of everything most of us have to get done in a day, how can we stay motivated to make choices that keep us growing?

Put another way, if we are basically wired to do what we feel like doing, how can we make ourselves feel like doing the right thing?

We don’t have to be pushed around by emotions

It’s not a simple question. There are so many different factors that come into play: our low-level, precognitive reptilian brain that perceives danger everywhere ... the conditioned responses we’ve learned from long experience with defying and meeting expectations ... our inborn desire to connect with and please other people. All of these inputs and more feed into our emotions, and our emotions largely determine what kind of decisions we make.

But we don’t have to be pushed around by all the different systems that influence how we feel. I’ve found that it is possible—at least sometimes!—to point my emotional state in a positive direction. My higher selves—my moral and cognitive impulses—can get together and decide where to go, and then I can get all those other selves on board, too.

Paying attention to something bigger

How? It’s a matter of attention. When the couch and the television are calling my name, and I choose to put my attention on how run-down I feel, it’s very easy to give in. After all, what does it really matter what I do? I am such a small and insignificant part of the bigger picture. So I may as well do whatever sounds like it will feel good.

But when I actually put my attention on that bigger picture and what it really is, I can see very clearly that my actions DO matter in the most desperate way. If I don’t pick up the ball, if I don’t develop my capacities to their fullest expression and push the boundaries of what it means to be human, then who will?

Top-down perspective

When I connect with the big picture, I can see life from the top-down perspective. I can see that my decisions moment-to-moment determine how far forward we push as a species. I can see that I am far more responsible for how this experiment turns out than I could ever have imagined from my smaller me-oriented vantage point. And rather than feeling run down or bored or apathetic, I start to feel excited to explore and create.

Emotions are incredibly complex phenomena. They seem to arise mysteriously, and we sometimes feel powerless to make choices when we are bathed in a powerful feeling. But we don’t have to just push through our experience with grim determination. We can learn to conduct our internal states, to create conditions favorable for making good decisions, and to use our emotional energy to continue to evolve. It’s all a matter of finding something bigger to be interested in and remembering to connect with it on a daily basis. More on the daily basis part on Wednesday ...

This is a very silly video from Improv Everywhere, a group that does, well, improv everywhere. Though this piece isn’t exactly improvised ... Basically these people set up some cameras in a grocery store produce section in Queens, wrote a goofy song about fruit and peace, and performed it in the middle of the day for lots of confused and bemused customers.

What I love about this is how it breaks up normal expected everyday reality. Stuff like this puts a grin on our faces and interrupts our regularly scheduled programs. It causes, as author Jonathan Fields said in a recent post, “a momentary awakening to the utter lunacy of the patterns we’ve adopted. And, though it’s taken years to wear those patterns into existence, in a heartbeat, we become unusually open to the notion that we can choose to respond differently. To create a new pattern.”

Have a wonderful weekend! And if you decide to burst into song at the farmers’ market, let us know what happens ...

image courtesy of Cara_VSAngel

On his blog about American philosophy and evolution, Jeff Carreira recently wrote about humanity’s evolutionary crisis—our inability to adapt to the rate of change we have created—and the two primary shifts we have to make to adjust our ideas about reality to reality.

The first shift concerns unity, so that we go from seeing the universe as a bunch of different things interacting with each other to understanding it as a single whole comprised of many parts. The second involves recognizing the ever-changing nature of reality. Things are not as stable and static as we think they are. In fact, every part of this whole is constantly moving around, bumping up against other parts, and both changing and being changed by the friction generated.

Understanding these ideas cognitively is one thing—and it is a big thing. And yet there is much more to it than that. What does it mean to live as part of one comprehensive, ever-evolving process?

We have all had the experience of standing in a beautiful landscape and feeling awed and humbled in the presence of something unspeakably good. The first environmentalists saw humankind as separate from this immensity, and therefore as a danger to it. But we aren’t separate—we’re part of the same whole. The same processes gave birth to every object, creature, and system in existence. The glory of an unfathomable landscape is in us, too.

The difference is that a mountain doesn’t have a choice in where it emerges, or when or how. But we do. We also have egos and self-identities and ideas about being separate from one another and nature. All of those are constructs of our consciousness, and they have served us well through the centuries—how could we learn to see and understand the different parts of reality without seeing ourselves as another independent part of it? But at this point, those constructs are obviously breaking down. As Jeff says it in his post, “I often feel like I am still working on yesterday’s problems only to realize that today’s are already upon me.” We need to do something else.

The shift Jeff is talking about is a big one—maybe the biggest ever. And though it depends upon individuals making a personal decision to develop, it’s much bigger than what is typically called personal development. All the reaching that we do—to think bigger, become stronger, get smarter, and inquire more deeply—this is what it’s really getting at. It’s not merely about getting really good at life as we know it. It’s about changing our understanding of what life is.

Can we take the leap into recognizing our contiguity with all of nature? Can we let go of our historical baggage and lean into the future like the goddess on the bow of a ship? Can we learn to steer?

I think we can, and that the more we look into our own personal willingness to do this—to courageously develop past everything we know right now—the more the bright green mirage on the horizon will shimmer into clearer and clearer focus.

image courtesy of Caveman 92223

Holding a bright green perspective in a largely cynical world is difficult for me. I’m not used to thinking positively about the future or seeing my own decisions as an integral part of what is being created. It’s not what I was raised or trained to do.

Rather, I tend to see myself as separate from everything else, and I’m used to feeling bad about where “the world” is heading. Sometimes I feel like a kook when I try to reach for a more positive and participatory of view. Sometimes it even feels fraudulent. How can I talk about becoming new people and bearing new gifts when so much what I do and feel is old and dingy and dark?

My spiritual path helps me accept all that I am, from snarky to infinitely creative, and to develop my ability to choose which stream to go with in every moment. Seeing the grand unfolding of the universe on a very very big scale gives me perspective on my smallness and also makes it clear how responsible I am for how this experiment goes. It requires me to expand my own awareness to brand new places, and grounds me in a community so that I don’t fly away in the process.

Living with the tension between who I usually am—small, separated, responsibility-shirking—and who I want to be—powerful, inspiring, constantly-developing—is freakin’ hard. It’s shameful and illuminating and challenging and thrilling. It is also the only way I know of to grow into a person who can envision and describe and create new paths into the future. For me, evolutionary spirituality—connecting with the spirit inherent in evolution itself—provides a framework for pushing the edge of these possibilities, and a reason to keep at it.

What about you? Does spirituality play a role in your desire to change the world? If so, how? If not, what motivates you? How do you keep going? I’m really curious about this ...

In this short video (which I saw on No Impact Man’s blog), researchers converted a staircase into a piano, making it a feature in an otherwise boring transit routine. As a result, they found that 66% more people chose it over the escalator than usual. There are other examples at TheFunTheory.com, a project of Volkswagen, and they are also running a contest with a prize of 2500€ going to the best new fun theory ideas.

Thinking about how this might work on a large scale is in and of itself a lot of fun. So much of environmentalism right now is about self-denial and shrinking—but does it have to be? What if it wasn’t? As we build new ways to live, how can we make them playful and more fun than what we are doing now?

Have a great weekend!

image courtesy of Nesster

Last week I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’s new documentary series on America’s National Parks. It focused largely on John Muir, the Scots-born American writer and philosopher who many think of as the first environmentalist.

Muir’s outlook was based largely on his deep spiritual connection with nature, gained through epic walks in the mountains of Yosemite and other wild places in the world, and conveyed through his writings. His words touched me as they touched so many of his contemporaries. He saw nature as God’s greatest expression and worked tirelessly to protect it from the encroachments of industrial society and its half-baked notions of “progress.”

Much of the environmental movement still has this anti-progress bias today. But I wonder, is this historically inherited bias still serving us? Backing up even more, can we look objectively at the concept of progress? I’m not sure that we can, but it’s worth a shot.

In its most basic, least historically loaded sense, progress simply means moving forward. Time progresses. Babies progress through stages as they develop into adults. Evolution progresses from simple structures to more complex ones: life couldn’t have evolved before matter, and people couldn’t have evolved before bacteria. Similarly, human culture progresses through stages of development: Obama couldn’t have come before Martin Luther King, Jr., who couldn’t have come before Harriet Tubman.

Culturally, a lot of us have a problem with the word “progress” because of the terrible things done in its name. We think of it as the weapon used to drive Native Americans off their lands, the rationale for turning a living mountain into a dead hole of a coal mine, the attitude of superiority and entitlement that allowed some peoples to claim the role of conqueror and others to assume the role of conquered. And these charges are all accurate. The concept of progress has been used to justify some of the worst acts in human history.

At the same time, though, progress has also been a force for good. Some (especially environmentalists) may romanticize historical periods and long to go back (whatever that means) but they are clearly in the minority. Most of us have no desire to live in the past, especially if we happen to be poor, non-white, or female. Even as “progress” has been used to wrongly oppress, progress without quotes has pushed us forward into the new and beneficial. We take much for granted, from indoor plumbing to individual civil rights, but our ancestors would marvel at the power that millions of us have at our fingertips every day of our lives.

In this exploration, though, the question of whether progress is a blind justification for terrible things or a real force pushing us ever further into a better future is the wrong one to ask. Like sexual desire, electricity, and the power contained in the nucleus of an atom, progress is a force, a fact of nature, and its impact is largely a matter of the consciousness with which we engage it.

The right questions are: How do we see this force and what do we do with it? Do we stick with our 20th Century ideas of “progress,” or do we look more deeply into progress as the forward-pointing arrow underscoring everything we know, past, present, and future? Do we use it to oppress and conquer and divide the world into categories of care about this/don’t care about that, or do we widen the circle and concern ourselves with the progress of the whole enchilada?

Instead of our knee-jerk rejection of progress, I believe we need to understand it more thoroughly so that environmentalism itself can evolve to value not only the plants and animals that comprise nature, but also the highest attainments of human culture, which need just as much protection. Because the reality is that all of creation—mountains, industry, and everything in between—springs from the same force: that singular arrow pointing ever forward.

image courtesy of John Althouse Cohen

I’ve been battling a cold the last several days, and have been spending some time catching up on my newsreader. I came across some wonderful things—some inspiring, some thought-provoking, and some pure policy wonk stuff—that I wanted to share with you.

First off—a place where inspiration and policy-wonkness meet! The Center for American Progress and the United Nations Foundation have released a new study that shows that, in addition to being the smart and right thing to do, cutting carbon emissions makes great economic sense. If we put our efforts on the lowest-hanging fruit—energy efficiency, reforestation, and renewable energy technology—we stand to save $14 billion over the next 10 years. That’s a lot of ducats to put into further changes.

Next up is an essay reminding us of an important distinction in our conversations about climate change. The systems that support our societies are far more vulnerable and less resilient than is nature itself. So when we talk about environmental devastation, we should be clear that what’s on the line are the achievements of human culture—the levels of health, wealth, material security, education, morality, and understanding that we’ve achieved through coming together in ever-larger groups. Do you want to leave your kids a Mad Max world or a bright green one? That’s really the question we are answering.

Now for a few links from the personal development angle. Since I first read it a month or so ago, I keep revisiting Penelope Trunk’s piece on How to have more self-discipline. What she writes resonates with me and also reiterates a point from Rapt (the book on attention that I keep talking about!)—the more we can direct our attention, the more we get done and the happier we are.

I think it goes deeper than mere productivity, though. It’s a matter of intention. When we decide that something is important enough to break the crust of habituation that normally rules our days, and we put time and effort into it, that gives our lives meaning. Rather than being bounced around by momentary impulses, we’re pointing in a direction that we’ve consciously, deliberately decided upon.

Finally, I wanted to point to an article that came out in The New York Times about the effects of your social network on your behavior: “Are Your Friends Making You Fat?” When researchers looked into the details of different social ties within groups, they found both positive and negative behaviors seem to spread across the entire group: if your friends quit smoking or gain weight, you are more likely to do the same thing.

It seems like this research is very much on the cutting edge and not too many conclusions can be drawn yet, but it’s fascinating to me in terms of creating a bright green future. If I become more positive and proactive, can I influence my friends in those directions, too? It will be exciting to see our understanding of this develops over time. The possibilities boggle the mind!

Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, appeared on The Colbert Report last night to talk about his year-long project to live without having any harmful impact on the environment, documented in his new book and movie. Colbert, expectedly, goofs on him—he chastises Beavan for the fact that, since they don’t have a TV at home, his daughter had to hear about Scooby-Doo at school. But it’s pretty good natured overall, and Beavan gets an opportunity to talk about the No Impact Week that his is co-sponsoring with the Huffington Post.

I have to admit that I’m of two minds about Beavan’s project. On one hand, it’s marvelous that he and his family were able to explore living in a new way, and even better that they found their new lifestyle to be healthier, more fun, and far more rewarding than their previous mode of heavy consumerism. On the other hand, lifestyle changes are a poor substitute for the full-scale soup-to-nuts transformation that we have to bring about in our culture in the next several years. On yet another hand (who’s counting?), Beavan’s project has made a great impact on a great many people, getting them to think about the way they live in new ways.

What I love about his message is that seems to be pushing these small lifestyle changes as a gateway drug to considering larger and larger ramifications of what we are here for, and how we can reinvent our culture to support human health, wealth, and security instead of mere consumerism.

Here’s the video of his short appearance on the Colbert report, as well as a link to a recent critical New Yorker article about his and other similar projects called “What’s Wrong With Eco-Stunts?” and Beavan’s response to that article. Both writers make excellent points, and rather than choosing sides, I’m inclined to think that the most important thing is that this discussion is even going on. What do you think? Let us know below ...

... in the comments.

image courtesy of Pink Sherbet Photography

Happiness is a hot topic right now. From Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project to No Impact Man’s quest to link voluntary simplicity with increased happiness to the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, the world seems full of people with advice on how to be happier.

Now, I’m generally a happy gal, and it makes me happy to think about other people becoming happier. I’m all for it! Especially when the happiness of the citizenry is used to make policy decisions on a big scale, as Enrique Peñalosa did in Bogota in the 90s.

But I wonder, as individuals, when we focus on happiness as a goal, aren’t we somehow missing the point? Put another way, is personal happiness itself best treated as a destination, or as a lovely side effect of living a meaningful life?

Happiness is two kinds of ice cream?

Of course, this has a lot to do with how we use the word happiness. Do we mean the lush, momentary ecstasy of a first taste of chocolate icing? The thrill of anticipation? Fruitful and deep connections with other people? A quiet sureness of who we are and confidence in what we are up to?

All of these are pleasant, no doubt, and each has a place in a happy life. Sometimes, they can even be hard to tell apart—I myself have a tendency to go for the chocolate cake when what I really want is a sense of connection.

Where deep happiness comes from: contribution and creativity

I think most of us can agree that real happiness feels like something more stable and longer-term than the fleeting awesomeness of physical pleasure. It feels deeply right—like an undercurrent of positivity, a sense that we’re on the correct path, or at least a good one. I know that as I write and learn and grow and connect—as I contribute and evolve—I feel more and more of it.

This is an important point, one that is often implied or relegated to the footnotes of happiness conversations. Practical, workable hacks to focus on the positive, achieve balance between generosity and self-respect, and remove friction from day-to-day life are helpful, and from one perspective, they work beautifully.

But from a larger perspective, something is missing. Even if we all learn to deal with people cordially and maintain good boundaries and try a little harder to understand each other, does anything change on a fundamental level? Aren’t we still wrapped up in ourselves to the exclusion of most other things?

For those of us who already have so much good fortune, focusing on how to be happier is the wrong approach

I’m not saying that being happy is wrong—just that making it our focus is a mistake. It puts too much emphasis on us and how we feel: What would I like? What would make me feel good? Which feeds our narcissism and ends up separating us from each other and from the enormous, participatory process that we are part of. How important is my happiness in the big, big, super big picture? Not very.

This is not to say that the happiness inquiry going on right now is a waste of time—the fact that we are learning about what makes human beings feel fulfilled and secure and productive is truly wonderful. I just don’t want to see us all in our own little bubbles continuing to focus on our own happiness with everything we’ve got while sea levels rise and animals go extinct and billions of people languish in poverty.

Can we pop those bubbles and create something new together?

In service to the idea that we can, I’d like to offer a few amendments to Gretchen Rubin’s (really quite lovely) Four Splendid Truths about Happiness.

Splendid Happiness Truth Amendment #1: Happiness is not the most important thing to pursue

Your happiness is not the most important thing in the world to pursue and neither is mine. We have far more important tasks, like learning how to see the problems we face now as catalysts and developing a new worldview that enables us to solve them.

Splendid Happiness Truth Amendment #2: Happiness is created when we come together and push ourselves

Everyone knows that as we give our energy and emotion and effort freely, happiness is created as a by-product and liberated within us. It’s a simple and familiar equation: give and you shall receive.

We might not always feel great in the process of building community and pushing forward together—it is messy and can be painful—but it is splendidly true that if we put our focus on the giving side of the equation, we can and will become radiantly, deeply happy at the same time.

As you can see, today we have launched a complete redesign of The Sunny Way. What do you think?

Our goal is to simplify the design to make the articles easier to read and digest. We also want to extend the cherry tree metaphor referenced in the book Cradle to Cradle. The task of 21st century environmentalists is not to do fewer bad things to the planet; it’s to redesign human society so that prosperity, health, and beauty—not waste and inequality—are its byproducts.

You may have noticed that over the last few months we’ve focused our message to dive into the relationship between personal development and changing the world. How can pursuing our own growth as individuals and groups be part of creating a new way to live? How does our mindset impact what we are capable of building? How do we be the kind of people who can create the future we want to live in?

Everything evolves through time. What’s most interesting to me is how we can participate in that process and leap beyond the problems we have now into a clean, just, prosperous future—as Alex Steffen puts it, “A future that is both bright and green.”

To create this bright green future, we must first believe that it’s possible. Then we must hold ourselves personally responsible to see that possibility through. This requires a huge amount of strength, clarity, and community. Our hope is that The Sunny Way can support us all in finding and using those resources.

Please click around and let us know what you think of the new design and our new direction. Thanks!

Your feedback is really appreciated.

YERT is “an environmental anti-depressant in film form.” Mark Dixon, Ben Evans, and Julie Dingman Evans drove around to every state in the US for a year, covering ideas to move us toward sustainability and the people who are working on them—from the Solar Roadways guy to the guy who lives in a cave.

Right now they are hard at work putting the film together and trying to get it exposure (Sundance!). Check out the trailer below—this is going to be a blast, and I wish them all the best. So much so that I just gave them some cash to help them finish it up. You can, too, at this link.

image courtesy of jurek d.

A few weeks ago, Seth Godin blogged about enormity:

If you’ve got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you’ve got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out, we’re going to move on in search of something smaller.

Now, Seth is a smart guy, and I don’t doubt that he is right about this. But at the same time, we actually are facing a generational problem that is going to take herculean effort. The jury is out on whether or not it will pan out. So if Seth is right, and people simply don’t have the capacity to respond to enormity at this level, even if that enormity is Reality, then what’s our next move?

I see the wisdom in breaking things down into smaller pieces—to divide and conquer and eat the elephant one bite at a time. But most of the piecemeal approaches out there strike me as shallow. Carrying a reusable shopping bag is great, but it is not enough. Nor are any of the other lifestyle changes people are making—not by a long shot.

For this reason, even the concept of trying to break it down strikes me as somewhat dishonest. We are neck-deep in a massive problem whose solution is going to take unprecedented effort on the part of millions of people. It requires reinventing the systems that support our lives, the organizations we use to relate to each other, even the way we think about our place in the grander scheme of things. A few wind turbines and solar panels and meatless Mondays won’t cut it.

So how do we break this generational problem down in a way that both tells the truth and allows humans to wrap our brains around it? I think it’s about depth, a commodity that many of us have left behind as connections between us grow in number and get easier to make and break. Depth of being, depth of inquiry, and depth of integrity. How many people discount Al Gore’s message because they perceive him as a person to be a hypocrite (for the record, I’m not one of these people—I’m just sayin’.)? How many of us relax into the idea that we can shop our way to a better future even as our deeper wisdom tells us that’s a lie? How many of us hide out in personal dramas and distractions even though we know these big changes need us to make them?

If we want to make a difference in the people around us and in the broader world, we can’t be scared of or deny or even softpedal the enormity of reality. Yes, we need to break down our enormous problems into doable pieces, but we need to do that from a context of truth as deep as our problems are broad. We can’t just put a happy green veneer on our inherently wasteful form of consumerism, break it down to a few small steps, and call it a day. If we keep looking at our situation from that level, we may as well just give up the ghost now.

Instead, we need to deepen our relationship to the real. Educate ourselves. Broaden our perspective. Challenge ourselves to become more comprehensive, empathetic, and wise. So that when we speak, it’s obvious that we want to make this work for everyone, and that we are telling the truth.

Because the truth is that it’s possible we can make this leap, person by person, bite by bite. No one can do it alone, and none of us can do all of it, but as we break it down and delegate and craft our message, we need to be clear that we are taking on enormity.

(I don’t know about you, but this fact fills me with more fire than dread ...)

image courtesy of Aldon

One Monday morning in early August, I was walking down 23rd street in Manhattan when a voice in my head yelled, “I want to get out of here.” Impressed by its sureness (I am a champion of ambivalence), I jumped online as soon as I got to work. I googled Cape Cod Community College and looked up their Language and Literature Dept. After a couple minutes of sleuthing, I found the name and email of the department chair. Ten minutes later, I had sent a carefully-tailored introduction of myself and job query to Ms. Polito. I told the voice in my head, “There.”

Over the past month, I’d been visiting my boyfriend on the Cape on the weekends and though he’d urged me to move, I’d always said, “What about work?” as though I would never be able to get a job there that wasn’t miserable. The truth was that I could do what I did in Manhattan on the Cape – if CCCC was hiring.

The work day rolled on in its familiar pattern. I chatted with my coworker Christine about our ESL Immersion kids and how we thought each would do on his or her upcoming ACT test. The dim lighting lulled me into a sense of being outside of time, outside of anything ever changing. But when I went to check my email around noon, I had received a reply from Sally Polito. She said that indeed, there were classes in need of instructors for the Fall semester. After a couple more emails, an interview was scheduled. 

Exactly a month later, I found myself walking down 23rd St. for the last time. I did feel a sense of relief, but I also felt a strong sense of loss. I’d been in New York long enough to grow roots. I felt like I was ripping them all out and, as many were intertwined with other people’s roots, I felt their discomfort as well. In some ways, I felt like I was betraying people, like living in New York really is a race and to peel off and leave is the same as quitting. Though I felt all this, I also knew it was just one way of looking at it. I think while living in New York, you often feel like your life is given meaning just by virtue of living in New York. Like War, New York is a force that gives us meaning. Being a New Yorker, or Brooklynite, if you will, can be an identity. For myself, I felt this taking over and I wanted to recapture the reigns of forging who I was and who I would be. In a way, New York had made it very easy to stay in one place. But I was ready to grow and to do that, I needed to liberate myself.

I’d fantasized about leaving New York almost since I’d arrived. I wrote two plays about it. In both, a character makes a dramatic exit for some wild environment. In the first,  it’s the Everglades and in the second, an undisclosed open field. It was a coincidence that a person I met in New York and later fell in love with would happen to live in a wild place, a place where you can walk a half mile and look out over a small lake surrounded by forest and see not one other human being.

My third morning in Cape Cod, I woke up and saw the sun shining brightly outside. I’d gone to bed homesick, but the morning light made me feel hopeful about this new place. I put on my clogs and started walking. Along my way, the only people I passed were landscapers and a woman picking tomatoes from her garden. I turned onto a gravel road. As I approached the edge of the land, I saw vivid blue water beyond it, wide and rippling. I looked to my left and saw no one. I looked to my right and saw no one. I felt a rise of elation in my chest. Here, here, I had made it to the place my characters had been longing to go. A wild place.

Why was this wild, open space so meaningful to me? In the city, illusions and commercial messages clogged my mind, inviting constant negative reactions that elbowed out room for active, creative thought. Here, there were no posters for Cougar Town or live HSBC bank promotions taking over Madison Square Park to analyze and, ultimately, feel superior to. Here, instead of feeling negative about and better than my surroundings, I was completely humbled. From this humbled state, I felt I could more authentically pursue my creative work and personal life. In the city, it felt like the songbird in my chest was muffled; here at the pond I felt it clamor robustly with life, push out its chest and sing.

William Blake said, “Sooner strangle a babe in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” Even when I was boxing up books and dishes in my beloved Brooklyn apartment and wondering if leaving a fully-fledged life in New York was the stupidest thing I’d ever done, I told myself that I had to follow this unbidden desire to its conclusion or bear the consequences of its suffocation.

As I stood overlooking that pond, I knew that I had made the right choice. I didn’t miss the walk down 23rd St., not even the intersection of 23rd, Broadway and Fifth that had always felt to me so important, like the confluence of great rivers. Once I had stood at that intersection and fantasized about stopping traffic to protest against war, in defense of life. Now I stood at my pond, finally living in defense of my own.

Alex Steffen is one of my heroes. His work on Worldchanging (the book and the website) is some of the most important work being done today, so I was stoked to find this hour-long video of a talk he gave at Yale this past spring. In it, he shares many of the ideas—already in play—that can create the bright green future we want to live in.

Right now, he says, there are 2 choices for the billions of mostly young people in the developing world: they can either stay poor and frugal, which no one wants to do, or they can become rich and wasteful like us, which would be an environmental catastrophe. What we need is a third choice—a new kind of prosperity that raises standards of living without trashing the planet. And those of us in the developed world have the resources to create this third choice, which makes it our responsibility.

In this talk, we learn how we are getting there, piece by piece. Dense and vital cities, smart power grid technology, economic and political power for women, thoughtful consumerism, and transparency in industry and government are all on the rise. And they interact in subtle, powerful ways to create new waves of innovation and freedom.

The G20 is meeting today in Pittsburgh, and I can’t help but wish they’d watch and discuss this talk. But part of building a bright green future is each of us taking on responsibility, here and now, to educate ourselves and bring these fresh ideas into our own circles of influence and care. I hope you will take the time this weekend to learn about what’s possible and, indeed, what is already happening, so that you can be part of it.

image courtesy of helgasms!

I grew up right at the beginning of “self-esteem culture.” We got ribbons for participating in Field Day, even if we didn’t win anything, and though our teachers didn’t hold back with criticism, they did take care with our feelings. This seemed to work pretty well; as I recall, I had a fairly good understanding of my strengths and weaknesses, and conceited kids were brought back down to size by the pack rather quickly.

It’s been almost 20 years since I was in school, though, and things have changed. Parents and teachers are more mindful of the self-esteem of children, and often praise them for, as Chris Rock famously put it, “shit they are supposed to do.” The result? Ever-more-entitled people who see themselves as special and above average for no particular reason.

I know this kind of smacks of the “Kids these days!” thing that happens in every generation. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Psychology researcher Jean Twenge documents the rise of self-infatuation among Americans in her recently released book, The Narcissism Epidemic, and in her blog. A quote (via the EnlightenNext editors’ blog):

There was a survey done last year asking college students about their academic experiences. To the question “If you explain to your professor that you’re trying hard, should he or she increase your grade?” two-thirds of college students said yes. I’m a professor and I study narcissism, and I was still shocked by that number! The “everybody gets a trophy” mentality basically says that you’re going to get rewarded just for showing up. First of all, that’s not how the real world works. Second, that won’t build true self-esteem; instead, it builds this empty sense of “I’m just fantastic, not because I did anything but just because I’m here.”

I’ve definitely noticed this in my life. A coworker tells me “I worked really hard on that project!” when the results obviously still need refining. Friends become infatuated with their own weaknesses, weaving them into an all-absorbing drama while real relationships and dreams crumble around them.

And I’m not immune either. My richly-deserved treats, my tendency to slack off whenever I feel like it, my fascination with everything that’s wrong with me—all are manifestations of this same phenomenon.

The funny thing is that, even as levels of unearned self-love rise, so do levels of cynicism, apathy, and prescriptions for anti-depressants. So apparently something is not working here.

Thinking about this reminded me of an experience I had in 11th grade. Schoolwork had always come easily to me, but it wasn’t until I had a challenging project to sink my teeth into—a long paper that required loads of research, writing, and editing—that I felt the true satisfaction of having done a good job. Even with all the As on my report card, I didn’t feel truly accomplished until I actually accomplished something difficult.

This experience and others taught me that real self-esteem cannot be protected or created from the outside. It develops as a result of effort from the inside.

The interesting thing about narcissism, to me, is that it presupposes that our psychodramas are endlessly fascinating when the truth is that they are decidedly not. I know that the workings of my psyche can be so mechanical that it bores me to tears. Aren’t you sick of dealing with the same problems you’ve had since you were 15? Aren’t there worthier and more interesting topics to be obsessed with?

The world needs us to tear our gaze away from our own reflections—to look up and participate in reality. Simply being here in and of itself does not make us unique or worthy of high self-regard; what we do shows who we are much more than what we believe about ourselves. If we are so special, then let’s prove it.

image courtesy of Lucius Kwok

This is a guest post from Marianne Luhrs, an Urban Planner and Disaster Preparedness Specialist currently working as a research assistant at John Jay College. She can be found online at LinkedIn and at her Google page.

Recently, there has been a “new” movement sweeping the nation and Europe. Well, maybe sweeping is too strong a word. “Popping up” might be more appropriate. The Transition Towns movement emerged four years ago with Rob Hopkins, a British ecologist. An April 19, 2009 New York Times article held that the movement, while it shares certain principles with environmentalism, actually regards itself as “deeper” and “more radical.”

The thrust of the Transition sales pitch is that escalating oil prices and worsening climate change impacts will eventually result in industrial society’s catastrophic collapse. To sidestep this “eventuality”, the group says we must foster community resiliency by embracing sustainability. Transition claims to be a new way to react to the problems of our time, but if you read a history of urban planning, you would find that there have been many such movements over the years.

Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), with his Garden Cities Movement, promoted the idea of a self-contained community. Separated from the industrial centers by a greenbelt, residents (ideal number 30,000) would live, work, go to school, and conduct business all within the community.  Three garden cities were constructed in England: Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, and Wythenshawe.  Unfortunately, the British apparently love their suburbs as much as Americans do: the three towns never evolved into the self-sustaining communities Howard envisioned. They mostly functioned as “Garden Suburbs” with residents commuting to the central cities for work. 

The Garden Cities Movement migrated to the United States as the New Towns Movement.  Again, the movement retained several of the failsafe basics, e.g., “returning to our roots”, “going back to the old ways” “recreating the medieval village” etc. And again it all sounded good. The one development constructed in the U.S. was Radburn, New Jersey (today in Fairlawn, New Jersey). Like the British towns, Radburn never established itself as a self-sustaining community, and matured into a suburb. 

More recently, there have been the New Urbanism developments (aka Traditional Neighborhood Development or TNDs), most famously, Kentlands, Gaithersburg, Maryland and Seaside, Florida designed by New Urbanism founders, Duany Plater-Zyberk.

Although these communities are regarded as highly desirable, they are not affordable to most middle-class households and are critiqued for their employment/housing mismatch—commercial centers primarily house retail shops whose employees cannot afford to live in the community, while those who can afford homes in the community commute to work. 

Like the Transition Towns initiative, the Garden City, New Town and New Urbanism movements promoted the idea of restructuring our lives and livelihoods to mirror the community patterns dominant during a past era. While many of the principles of “sustainability” (local business centers, locally grown food, walkability, achieving a solid jobs/housing match, etc) are laudable and make sense, they are often difficult to achieve in practice. And some ideas do not make sense. Presumably, Transition Town residents will continue to work and carry on their lives. If someone lives in a Transition Town but commutes 40 miles to a job a few towns over, is it reasonable to think they’re going to quit their job and find one closer to home to allow them to more fully embrace their commitment to their community? And, while in theory the idea of relocalizing and reskilling may sound good, not everyone has time—or even wants to make the time—to grow community gardens, learn how to sew and mend clothing, and formulate Energy Descent Plans.

First and foremost, we are a global society. And there is no turning back the clock.  As attractive as the concept of “relocalizing” may be, it is incredibly naïve to think that it is possible to manufacture a new, old way of life so far removed from present day America. Especially when one considers the rugged individualism and independence that America was founded on.  Beyond the most strident believers waiting for society’s downfall, it is hard to envision mainstream, working class America embracing this movement. 

Second, I would point out a major inconsistency in the Transition Towns argument: their dismissive attitude towards technology.  The industrial and technological eras of the past two centuries are just as integral a part of our shared history as the medieval/agrarian eras the Transition Towns want to replicate.  Harkening to the characteristics of a preferred past era while denying the considerable benefits of another era smacks of sentimentality over reason. And that’s no way to win a war.   

Last, despite my criticisms, I hope that the Transitions movement does succeed in promoting awareness of real problems (e.g., peak oil, climate change, overdependence on foreign oil, etc.)  and does generate discussion regarding potential solutions. However, “the media is the message.”  Given the vast number of media outlets, how the message is packaged is more important today than ever before. Packaging for the fringe is not the most expedient way to reach the masses. And this is a debate that must reach the masses if anything at all is to change.

image courtesy of ms.Tea

I was catching up on my newsreader this morning and came across this article from Tim Ferriss’s blog, an excerpt from the book The Leap (which I haven’t read, but after reading this bit of it, I will). This excerpt examines Bill Gates’s “origination story” and in the process, explodes the myth of entrepreneurs as audacious risk takers. According to author Rick Smith, “The Leap” actually unfolds as a series of small steps of testing hypotheses and tweaking ideas until the big risk becomes the next logical step.

“You don’t have to be fearless to make dramatic changes in your life. Transformative change isn’t propelled by raw courage. It’s “sparked” by a series of events that build exposure and experience, both of which help to create asymmetric risk. Through sparking, the upside opportunity is confirmed while downside risk is mitigated. Ultimately, the leap—when it comes—is not one of faith but of experience, even of comfort, just as it was for Gates.”

This is really an exciting idea to contemplate in terms of building a new way for humans to live based on bright green principles. We don’t have to screw up our courage and take a massive leap into the unknown. We just have to try new things, accept the feedback, and try again. This involves a certain amount of self-discipline for sure to avoid falling back into inertia, and a certain amount of discomfort. But maybe looking at it this way makes our enormous task of reinvention a little less terrifying and a bit more fun.

What do you think about this? How much risk is involved in creating a new way to live? How much risk is involved in avoiding it?

image courtesy of shareski

Last night I took part in a great conference call with my homies from EnlightenNext. We talked about our experiences over the last month or so, and most of us reported that this summer was a time of rapid change. Some of us started demanding educational programs, others got new jobs, I moved house—and we all also described the same feelings of terror and elation as we took on new challenges and watched our old lives fade away in the distance.

I know for me that when things get scary, I have a tendency to retreat into old habits. I eat too much, I sit on my arse too much, I hibernate and spend too much time alone. The funny thing is that, before I do these things, they sound like a lot of fun. “Don’t I deserve a break?” I ask myself, and the answer is resoundingly yes. But after a day or so of indulgence, I invariably feel shitty. The “treat” I so “deserved” isn’t even fun.

On the call we talked about this phenomenon. On one hand, it’s great, because we can start to see how the habituated part of ourselves, the part that is afraid of change and that clings desperately to whatever smidge of security it can (called “the ego” in many circles), actually LIES to us. “This macaroni and cheese and ice cream and potato chips and Buffy marathon is going to be awesome!” Meanwhile, the part of ourselves that wants to embrace change and create the new knows better, but we choose not to listen.

Why? I think there are a couple of things going on. First off, habits and the rituals associated with them feel comforting, even if they are destructive. Witness the behavior of drug addicts, abused women, and people in the throes of a thousand other categories of addiction.

Then there’s the fear of the unknown. On some level, we think that if we stick with what we know, we will be safe. Of course, this is bullshit, but evolution has inculcated us with a strong desire for security, and in most cases we’re hapy to stick with the devil we know rather than peek behind door number 2.

This dynamic operates on all levels, from what we decide to do with an evening to what we decide to do about climate change. And it occurs to me that shifting this dynamic—bravely stepping into that which has never been created or experienced before—is the fundamental task involved in building a new kind of future.

How do we do it? We look at ourselves objectively. We make decisions and stick with them, calling on each other for support and guidance and strength as much as we can. And when we’re in the throes of the ego’s attack, we learn to recognize that it is lying. That, in fact, clinging to old patterns will NEVER make us happy, nor will it allow anything new to emerge. And that the magnificence of our creation is directly proportional to the fear we feel when stepping out to create it.

This requires courage—to feel fear and do what we know is right anyway. And it requires objectivity—to look at the mechanics of our psyches clearly, from a higher place. Meditation helps with both, as do conversations like the one we had last night, and the ones we have here on The Sunny Way.

How do you handle the fear involved with changing your habits, resisting temptations, and trying new things? I would love to hear about your experience, either in the comments, or on twitter. Here’s to a new day filled with lots of scary things and lots of brave actions in the face of them.

image courtesy of slash___

Saturday I attended a workshop led by Pamela Slim (author of Escape from Cubicle Nation) and Jonathan Fields (author of Career Renegade) designed to help budding entrepreneurs step through the process of turning our passions into viable business models.

As Pam and Jonathan shared their hard-won expertise and helped us evaluate our ideas, I started think how new this was. Ten years ago, or even five, how many big selling authors would take an entire day to educate fledgling entrepreneurs and possible competitors? It’s not like they did this for free, of course—each of us paid a fee to be there—but still, the monetary rewards seemed modest for a whole day out of both of their lives.

Moreover, these two writers have a wide overlap in the audiences they serve. They are each others’ competition. And yet they chose to work together.

From a traditional business standpoint, this looks kind of crazy. But from the strange brew of internet accessibility, the critical-condition economy, and the gnawing questions many of us have about the value of a life dedicated to corporate service, a new way of doing business is emerging.

Instead of baffling, old-school org charts, this new economy—based on generosity, encouragement, and partnership—creates its own kind of hierarchy where the size and dedication of your market is directly proportional to the contribution you give them.

Thinking about all this, I was reminded of Cradle to Cradle and its explanation of economics from the point of view of a cherry tree.

Consider the cherry tree: thousands of blossoms create fruit for birds, humans, and other animals, in order that one pit might eventually fall to the ground, take root, and grow. Who would look at the ground littered with cherry blossoms and complain, “How inefficient and wasteful!” The tree makes copious blossoms and fruit without depleting its environment. Once they fall on the ground, their materials decompose and break down into nutrients that nourish microorganisms, insects, plants, animals, and soil. Although the tree actually makes more of its “product” than it needs for its own success as an ecosystem, this abundance has evolved (through millions of years of success and failure or, in business terms, R&D), to serve rich and varied purposes. In fact, the tree’s fecundity nourishes just about everything around it.

What might the human-built world look like if a cherry tree had produced it?

On Saturday, as I conversed with other people trying to wrap our minds around new possibilities and contemplated how I can offer more inspiration and direction to you, the open-hearted and concerned readers of The Sunny Way, I felt like we were getting a bit closer to answering that question.

image courtesy of omniNate

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. I packed everything I owned, sold a big portion of it, moved, and unpacked. To top it all off, summer just ended. What this translated for to me was a perfect storm of stress, partying, and mountains of fried food. Oy.

A few years ago, I would have looked over the past month and gotten discouraged with myself. I’d call myself a colossal screw up, and this period of my life—which has generally been quite healthy and productive—would come to end in a glorious blaze of French fries, ice cream, and primetime television. I’d simply give up, at least until the next time I got annoyed with my unhealthy self and started again.

Only thing is, each time the pendulum swings from strict compliance to wild defiance, damage is done. In Rapt, Winifred Gallagher talks about this phenomenon, quoting research psychiatrist George Ainslie:

[Willpower] is a bargaining situation with your expected future selves, in which the present choice is a test case for a whole category of probable choices in the future. Why not eat the cake? After all, one piece won’t show! What you lose isn’t that little bit of slimness, however, but your expectation that you’ll be able to stick to your diet.

This passage reminds me that progress in life comes less from grand gestures and more from simple choices made moment-to-moment. When I falter, I don’t need to beat myself up or throw my hands up in the air. Instead, I can acknowledge that I’ve gotten off track and steer myself back. Here’s how I’m doing that.

• Keep it simple. Now is not the time to start a complicated new routine. I know what I need to do to feel healthy and strong—eat tons of greens, exercise, spend time writing and in meditation—so I’m focused on doing those things every day.
• Use my support system. My loved ones want me at my best, and they are more than willing to help me out. It’s important that I not spend too much time sitting on my butt drinking beer right now, and they understand.
• Remove the drama. For me, drama and failure tend to go hand in hand, so I’m trying to keep drama out of this process. My feelings have to be less important than the commitments I’ve made. That doesn’t mean I ignore my emotions—if I feel grumpy, I try to reverse it, and if I feel good, I enjoy it. But either way I remind myself that it’s solely up to me to keep the good decisions coming.
• Be consistent and vigilant. The hard part is getting the boat turned around. Once I’m heading in the right direction, it becomes a bit easier to just keep moving that way. But it’s a fine line between taking advantage of momentum and becoming complacent. I need to keep my goals in mind every day. Every day in which I take good care of myself becomes a source of continuing confidence and growth.
• Think big. I have a tremendously juicy project on the burner right now and I’m excited about it. Taking good care of myself means I have more energy to develop my ideas and bring them into reality. This changes how I see my efforts—what could have been an epic struggle (Madge vs. The Waffle Cone!) becomes just a background track to a larger story. Which makes it a lot easier to make good decisions.

My friend and coach Maia clued me into something a while ago that is really just starting to sink in: “Self care means moving forward.” Eating well, exercising, and staying away from the mood-alterers are all choices that literally increase my ability to think bigger and to create more. The more I care for myself, the more I can contribute; and that’s what this is really about.

Today’s video is from author and speaker John Marshall Roberts, who covers terrain familiar to The Sunny Way—how to use the ideas of personal and cultural development to create change in the world. He uses the work of Clare Graves (which we’ve discussed before) to show the many ways human beings think about life, and to break down what works when communicating with people with these different worldviews.

I have to admit it was a little rough for me to get past the New Age-y graphics—I have a pet peeve about them!—but I’m glad I did. Roberts has a deep understanding of how change works and is able to share it really effectively. I’m definitely going to grab his book.

image courtesy of fazen

Since Monday’s post, I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom. What is it? What is it for? As I unpacked and organized and pondered these questions, I remembered Naomi Wolf’s wonderful book Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, and specifically this passage on the Declaration of Independence:

The Declaration is not saying: “Hurrah, you are born free, enjoy your bingo or your yoga as you see fit.” ... Rather, it is saying something darker and more personally demanding: you have a sacred obligation to take the most serious possible steps and undergo the most serious kinds of personal risks in defense of this freedom that is your natural right ... Jefferson left us not a guarantee of a life basking in a lawn chair, but rather a guarantee of a life of personal upheaval and sacrifice when necessary.

In May I wrote that this blew my mind, and that’s still the case several months later. I’ve made a lot of changes over the last few years in the pursuit of more freedom—creating a flexible work arrangement, saving money, even starting a practice of meditation, which is largely about gaining freedom from one’s own history and thought patterns.

This process has worked well, and at this point in my life, I am freer than I ever have been. Many of us are—more people are working for themselves and traveling and designing new lifestyles than ever before in history. The people reading this site are, for the most part, free in a way that has no precedent in human history.

The question now is, what are we doing with this freedom, with these opportunities?

Just as money freed up doesn’t amount to much if it’s frittered away, so personal freedom is absolutely useless if not put into the service of something greater. It isn’t just about being able to do what we want. In its highest expression, freedom is fierce and productive. It seeks to expand and concoct.

Today my goal is to remember what freedom is for—creation and contribution—and to use mine wisely.

courtesy Pink Sherbet Photography

Well, I’m all moved out of my old apartment and into the new. I’m getting unpacked, having fun setting up my new space, and it’s nice here. Still, I felt kind of sad last night as I locked the door to the old place for the last time. I have lots of great memories of that flat; my years there were very, very happy.

Even deeper than that, though, is the fact that the apartment represented security for me—the most and best security I’ve had in my life. This was huge, and very nourishing in a way that I sorely needed after my chaotic childhood.

After my mom died when I was 5, my dad went into a bit of a tailspin, and our family moved dozens of times. I never had a whole year in one school until I was almost a teenager. Sometimes we had plenty of food and money; other times we had very little of either.

I adapted and did fine, and in some ways I liked our adventurous way of living. Sometimes, though, I hated it and wished I had a normal family, piano lessons, and trips to summer camp like my friends.

There’s no denying that all this insecurity shaped me. My adult life has largely been a reaction against the chaos of my childhood. I’ve made stability a very high priority, maybe the highest, because I don’t want to be sleeping on someone’s couch like we did when I was a kid.

But recently I’ve been questioning how important the pursuit of stability should be. It is wonderful to have a sturdy platform from which we can do most anything else. But if it’s the biggest priority it can become kind of a trap, limiting our freedom to try new things and to grow.

My old apartment was a blessing, and I’m so grateful to have lived there. But it also took up a lot of time and money—about half my take home pay every month. In a way I’ve been sacrificing the real security of a growing nest egg for the perceived security of a lovely large apartment.

I was also very house-proud when I lived there. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I guess, but I think maybe I liked being the girl with the awesome apartment a little too much. Maybe there are better things to be proud of.

There’s also the fundamental fact that life is not secure, no matter how much stability I seek, no matter how many beautiful supports I build up around me. The forces of stability and freedom are always playing with each other, creating continuity and novelty, and it’s our task to learn how to play with them.

At this point, instead of sinking all my resources into stability, I want to focus on learning to ride the wave of freedom, to lean into the winds of change and not be scared of where they will take me. I’ve no desire to jump off the deep end with this—it’s not like I’m going off to live in a box or a cave. I’m just seeking a more realistic balance between security and freedom, where I can have a place to lay my head and also be light on my feet.

Accepting the fundamental instability of life feels like growing up to me. I’m no longer a child seeking security above all else. Instead I’m an adult choosing more freedom—looking forward to, and more ready than ever ready to help create, what’s next.

image courtesy of torres21

The to-do list to get us from where we are to the clean, just, beautifully designed future we want is extremely long. Lots and lots of things need to change—everything, in fact. Which is quite overwhelming.

It’s so overwhelming that a sensitive, concerned person could easily get lost in wondering where to start. Ask me how I know this! I can’t even begin to count the hours I’ve spent daydreaming about the best way to contribute. Should I install solar panels in poor communities, teach workshops to kids, create an urban homestead like the Dervaes family? What would be the most impactful? Where could I do the most good? What would I enjoy the most?

The result of all this? I’m sure you guessed it. Nada mas. And, oddly, contemplating all these options not only didn’t help anything—it also made me feel like crap. Every discarded idea actually made me more helpless. If I couldn’t even figure out what to do with myself, how could I help change the world?

Eventually I realized that it’s not really possible to sort all this out on paper. It requires action. For many reasons, any project is better than no project.

The decision-making process can eat up your entire life if you let it

Sifting through options can easily become its own project, and there’s no end to it. Of course you want to learn a bit about your ideas before you jump into them, but there comes a point where each new option that you uncover actually pushes your decision further away. I call this “50 kinds of spaghetti sauce syndrome” but it has an actual name—the Paradox of Choice—and books have been written about it. Before analysis paralysis sets in, pick something that sounds good and get into it. You’ll know soon enough if it’s right for you…

You need data from real-life experience (not just books and blogs)

The only way it’s possible to learn whether you resonate with a particular cause or organization is to get involved with it. You can’t understand a group’s dynamics or even the deeper content of its mission by reading the website. I’ve gotten involved in projects that seemed perfect for my interests and skills, only to find that up close and in person, they didn’t engage my spirit. The opposite has happened, as well. You can’t know until you jump in and try.

Momentum is easier to work with than inertia

Inertia creates an initial hump when you first move from inaction to action, but once you’re going, you’ve got momentum on your side and it becomes far easier to keep going. Even if you decide to change projects, you’ve still got momentum working in your favor—you’re used to doing something besides going home and growing roots in the couch every evening; you’ve learned that getting involved with something new isn’t as daunting as it looks. Getting over that initial hump is by far the hardest part, so why not get it out of the way as soon as you can?

Specific skills are less important than enthusiasm

I’ll let you in on a secret: activism is not rocket science. Most projects are far more about interest and commitment than genius. What are you passionate about in “everyday life”? Learn about it and get involved with groups who are trying to transform it. There is always a way for you to help.

Figuring out how to work together is the #1 thing each of us can do to change the world

Even No Impact Man, the reigning king of lifestyle change, agrees—individual tweaks to the details of how we live are not going to get us where we want to go. We need to come together behind larger goals.

And there is a deeper facet to this as well that has to do with changing our culture. If you are as sick as I am of polarized arguments, meaningless talking points, and endless yelling on the same subjects, then it’s up to us to create a new way for human beings to relate to each other. Working together within groups gives us the chance to discover and practice new ways of interacting based on creativity and collaboration. In doing this, we actually create a new culture.

If you’re reading this site, you obviously care about the world and have some desire to contribute positively to it. This deep care is really all you need to make a positive impact. The important part is to get the ball rolling, make adjustments, and align your work with your interests.

And you may find, as so many others have, that something really cool happens when you do this: as your talent and passion are unleashed, your life comes to life! Jump in—to anything—today.

image courtesy of David Paul Ohmer

This week I’m getting ready to move, and so I’ve been focused on small, mundane details and plans. Rushing around getting everything ready, I realized that I tend to see the day-to-day minutae of my life as somehow separate from the larger mission of creating a lovely, fair, functional future, like I have to choose between attending to what needs attention right now and what needs attention in the larger sense.

Silly, right? I think most of us do this, though. We focus on the everyday demands placed on our time, and we lose the thread of our larger desires and goals. How do we stitch the two back together? How do we live each day, and make each choice, in the context of creation and responsibility?

It depends on where we put our focus, and how we spend our time. Here are some things to keep in mind as you decide where to apply these precious resources each day.

Train yourself to be more positive.

This doesn’t mean walking around like a dope. It just means letting go of some of the fear, worry, and anger—and their more mundane cousins annoyance, grumpiness, and irritability—so that you can see more options and possibilities.

Look beyond the normal arguments.

If thesis is the way things are, and antithesis is the reaction against the way things are, look for the synthesis—the higher level that embraces and makes a new kind of sense out of both sides of a disagreement. If you look at 2 opposing forces and squint your eyes, sometimes you can see where they aren’t opposed at all. Sometimes you can’t, of course, but it’s always worth a try.

Pick a project.

Become obsessed with something. Get to know it intimately. If you’re fascinated by fashion, learn about its history, where clothes are produced, who is involved, and how others are working to transform it. If you love food, hang out at the farmers’ market. Grow food and cook it and eat it. Dive right in with enthusiasm and leave the cynicism behind (see point 1). You’ll invariably see things that you can and want to help with.

Keep working on yourself.

Practice honesty, courage, grace, and integrity. Become a better instrument. Increase your power, your determination, and your ability to think on your feet. Stand up for what is right and expect more from yourself every day. Remember that the stronger you are, the more good you can do in the world, and every day brings opportunities to become stronger.

Changing the world can seem like a far-off, daunting task—big and scary and impossible. But it’s not. It comes down to the simplest choices we make every day. Do I watch TV tonight, or read a book to educate myself? Do I stay home or go to this meeting? Do I do what’s comfy and familiar, or do I push myself a bit?

This is how the world is changed: each of us taking on more responsibility to change it, dedicating ourselves to something higher, and working together to bring the possibilities shimmering like a mirage on the horizon into the here and now.

What if you could do some good while waiting on line at the grocery store? The Extraordinaries want to help you help the world by giving you chances to volunteer via their iPhone app.

The project is still in its infancy right now—there were only about 10 active projects when I looked at the app the other day, and most of them were requests to tag photos in big image libraries. And of course there are limits to what can be done in a few minutes on an iPhone, but there’s tons of potential here. I envision volunteers answering questions from school kids, documenting buildings that need to be weatherproofed, reporting on neighborhood meetings for community sites, assisting non-profits with online research ... No doubt as The Extraordinaries build their pool of volunteers and tasks to be done, more and more good opportunities will emerge.

Crowdsourcing has produced some of the best resources available today—like Wikipedia itself—so why not apply the same idea to doing a bit of good? In this short video, co-founder Jacob Colker explains what The Extraordinaries are up to. Want to be a part of it? Get the iPhone app here.

image courtesy of jonnykeelty

Grumpiness happens. For me, it’s when people are willfully clueless and/or bad drivers and/or walking too slow on the sidewalk in front of me. I can feel myself get tense and then I start muttering to myself like a crazy person. It’s not pretty!

Beyond ‘not pretty,’ though, it also has a larger impact. On days when I give in to being grumpy, I get less done. I spend valuable moments replaying the annoying things that happened and parsing my reactions to them. “I shouldn’t have been snippy with so-and-so,” etc.

Of course this is a total waste of time.

Why your mood matters

There’s also the fact that, as I learned in Winifred Gallagher’s excellent book Rapt, negative emotions cause us to see fewer possibilities, and to constrict our focus. Think about millions of grumpy faces dotted across the world on any given day. How many great opportunities and connections are we missing because we’re focusing on the wrong things?

It’s clear that part of changing the world is learning to manage our emotions so that we can see clearly even when surrounded by terrible drivers and slow walkers. I can’t say I’m perfect at this, but I have come a long way, and most days I find it quite easy to maintain a positive outlook. Here’s what’s worked for me:

Get clear on your desire to be more positive

Take 5 minutes to remember the last time you lost your shit when you shouldn’t have. How did you feel afterward? How did the person you went off on feel? Did either of you deserve that drama? No need to beat yourself up about it, but remembering the damage done by your last bad mood can motivate you to nip the next one in the bud.

Notice when you are getting grumpy

My excellent life coach taught me that the first step to changing any habit is to notice it. What triggers a bad mood for you? How does it feel in your body when it starts? Study your behavior like a scientist, then use this information to change.

Rewire yourself to look at things differently

Once you’ve gotten good at noticing how and why and when you get grumpy, throw a wrench into the pattern. If you feel yourself starting to get tense, take a few deep breaths. Talk to yourself: “It really doesn’t matter that the person in front of me in the left lane is doing less than the speed limit. I’m still going to get where I’m going.” Redirect your attention on something else—an upcoming trip, the delicious dinner you’re going to have, or something that you read. The idea is to focus on something other than how entitled you are to your bad mood, preferably something juicy that excites you.

Ask for help

If you’re having a hard time popping yourself out of your habitual foul mood, enlist a loved one’s help. Of course, sometimes having your grumpiness pointed out to you can make it worse, so it helps develop a goofy code system to defuse the emotion. The sillier the better. One of my loved ones and I have a special peculiar voice and phrase we use with each other when one of us is starting to get into the red zone. It’s so dumb, it makes us laugh every time, and laughter is like Kryptonite to grumpiness.

Analyze failures and successes and adjust course

Maybe the goofy codeword thing makes you angrier. Or maybe you find that one specific memory of something hilarious always works to de-escalate the rising tide of misery. Try different tactics, and take note of what works and what doesn’t. For my part, I’ve found that noticing when I’m being a dick, and sincerely not wanting to be a dick, is pretty much enough. I tell myself to calm down, take a few breaths, and force my attention onto something fun or interesting.

When all else fails, contain it

Sometimes none of these tactics work and you’re just stuck in a pissy mood. At these times, there’s nothing to do but minimize the damage. Go off by yourself for a while if you can—read a book or take a walk or have a good sweat at the gym. (A good sweat is particularly good.) If that’s not possible, take extra time and care with your words and actions. The fact that you’re in a bad mood doesn’t entitle you to inflict it on everyone else. When I’m in an awful mood, I try to look at it as my sacred duty to bear my bad feelings so that no one else has to. This makes me feel grown-up and strong, which sometimes banishes the bad mood in and of itself.

We have too much to do to waste time and energy and precious attention on mundane things that aren’t exactly as we’d like them to be. By learning to manage our moods moment-to-moment, we increase our ability to act and to forge connections with others in creative ways. We also literally open ourselves up to more possibilities.

Don’t let grumpiness steal any more of your life. Develop your awareness and your agency, and watch your life improve as your mood does.

image courtesy of jurvetson

The beginning of a new software project feels like the start of a quest—you can see that something needs to be done, but there’s no clear path to the goal. You have to dive into the details and figure it out.

There are two general ways to go about this. One is to get a bunch of business analysts together and send them out to get information. They talk to the folks who will be using the software; they gather requirements. Then they write a specification, a document that lays out in minute detail how the system should work: every screen, every button. Then the programmers get to work building it, and you release it to the users at the end.

The second way to develop software is to create one tiny bit of it, release it to the end-users, gather their feedback, then correct that tiny bit and create one more. Keeping the end goal in mind, your software grows bit by bit until it provides everything the users need, or at least the most important stuff.

Why a fluid, scary process works better

The second process seems scarier at first—it requires a lot of faith in your team. Without a big master plan, you must rely on their ability to think on their feet, come up with ideas, and resolve disputes as they arise.

In action, though, it works quite well. Developers generally love working like this because it gives them lots of opportunities to think creatively and solve problems. If you have a good team, they tend to rise to the responsibility. And the users generally get what they need, because they have had input all along the way.

On the other hand, the first method typically costs more, takes longer, and produces irrelevant, clunky software. Software projects are different from, say, construction projects where you can plan out every detail in advance; it’s more abstract and full of questions. You invariably going to run into situations that aren’t addressed in the plan, and at that point, rigid adherence to it costs you time, money, and quality.

Uncertainty and responsibility

Much of the environmental debate right now focuses on certainty. How can we know that cap-and-trade will work? How do we know that any proposed solution will be better than the status quo? The truth is that, while we can make educated guesses, we are all in the unknown right now. We can’t make a detailed master plan for how to make everything all right.

Part of us really wants to, because where we are right now is scary, and it’s hard to muster the necessary faith in these kind of circumstances. We don’t just want a vision—we want to see how we’re going to get there. We want a step-by-step program.

But there isn’t one—we have to make this road by walking on it. So what we need to do is hold the end goal in mind, take tiny, well-reasoned steps, and evaluate them along the way.

This requires much from each of us. Without decisive marching orders, each of us must be more responsible and responsive. We have to hold our vision of what’s possible even as we operate within the unknown. We must be strong in our ability to act, flexible enough to use new information, and mature so that we keep going even when we don’t feel like it. We have to bring our A-game to every situation.

There’s no master plan and there’s no one in charge—there’s just us and our ideas of what’s possible and our determination to create. And that is precisely why we need to develop ourselves and our ability to work with each other. I’ll share some ideas on how to do this in Wednesday’s post.

In this TED Talk, science writer and founder of AskNature Janine Benyus explains Biomimicry—the process of looking to nature for sustainable solutions to design problems. As she says, “We live in a competent universe. We are part of a brilliant planet, and we are surrounded by genius.”

During the talk, she reveals dozens of new products that take their cue from nature with spectacular results. Take a look: 

Have a great weekend, everyone!

image courtesy of Beyond the Lens

I started writing a post about how it pisses me off when people say things like, “It’s easy to be optimistic when you have such a cushy life.” As though I am so happily clueless that I couldn’t possibly understand the Big Bad Facts of how screwed up things are. Because if I did, I’d obviously be as cynical as most everyone else.

Now, it’s true that I am a happy, privileged person, but I also get how screwed up things are. I really do. And yet I don’t respond cynically. My take on it is that having privilege means that we have a duty to put that good fortune into making the world better. To me, cynicism looks like a cop-out, a convenient way to shirk that responsibility: “Well, we’re screwed anyway, nothing I can do about it, so I may as well sit on my ass and watch TV.” It’s a lazy, victimized mentality, and it’s bullshit.

HOWEVER. I did say on Monday that my goal is not to argue with cynics, and it’s not. The last thing I want to do is perpetuate patterns of argument and polarization that, in the end, amount to so much wheel-spinning. Furthermore, people have a right to any point of view they want, even if it looks wasteful and wrong to me.

My goal in writing here is to connect with people who are already beyond cynicism, who see their responsibility to change the world for the better, and who want to engage with it.

I’m also guessing that there are at least some folks out there who are dissatisfied with the typical status-quo points of view, but who aren’t aware of alternate ways of thinking. People who don’t jibe with Republicans, Democrats, raging capitalists, or raging environmentalists ... who think there must be some other stance to take.

These are the people I want to reach most of all, because I’m dissatisfied with the typical perspectives as well. And there are other ways to see—ways that are positive, practical, and grounded. I’m hoping we can talk about them, refine them, and figure out how to bring them into reality.

We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. Neither can we go back in time to live in some mythical, romanticized tribe or village. Our only option is to push forward into new ways of thinking, living, and creating.

How to do that is what I’m hoping to focus on here. Not everything that’s wrong—but what we can learn and do and become to make it right.

image courtesy of Pear Biter

Over the last few days, we’ve had an explosion of conversation here on The Sunny Way. It’s amazing to see so many people grappling with this stuff, and so important! Lots of ideas are in the mix, but I’ve noticed that they largely seem to boil down to one major question, and so that’s what I wanted to look into today:

Is development real?

Subquestions: Have humans evolved at all? Are things really better now than they were before industrialization? What should we be aiming for: a return to the past, or a new future that we can’t even really imagine yet?

If you’ve been on The Sunny Way for more than 30 seconds, it’s probably obvious what my answers are. But my goal—really—is not to argue with people who see things differently. My goal is to share the worldview that allows me to be optimistic, in hopes that it might help others find the strength to lay aside their habitual disgruntlement, and the courage to create what’s never been created before.

In short, I want to share with you a rational framework for optimism in the 21st century. Here are the reasons why I think it’s reasonable and accurate to be optimistic. Incidentally, this also gets into the reasons why personal development is a crucial part of changing the world.

We have changed! Which means we can change more!

Now, no one is saying that we are saints. But we’re a damn sight further along than we used to be. Our bloodlust is diminished; our care for the whole of humanity has increased. There are still bloodthirsty and self-obsessed people, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that most 21st century humans are far more connected with the rest of the world than anyone ever has been.

War is at an all-time low (if you don’t believe me, scroll down to paragraph 12 of this piece), health is at an all-time high, and education is causing more minds to blossom than at any other time in human history.

Does that mean that we should just lay back and enjoy our peace and prosperity when so many others in the world don’t have it? Of course not. It just means that progress is possible. And it also points to a possible good use for all our good fortune ...

Cultural development happens largely through the efforts of people with a higher moral vision

Why was slavery abolished? Why did women win the right to vote? Why was Civil Rights legislation passed? Why did we go to the moon? Each of these questions has a complex story that would fill many volumes. But all of them also share one simple answer: someone had an idea of how things could be better and rallied others who agreed.

Blood, sweat, tears, and toil were also required—I said it was simple, not easy. But we can learn from these great leaps forward. We can study their mechanics and apply their lessons in our own context. Most of all, we can gain strength from their success.

It’s up to us, now more than ever

There are millions of us who feel morally, ethically, and/or spiritually compelled to live in a new way—a way that brings prosperity to everyone, a way that works for the entire biosphere. And many of us have a great deal of wealth, education, and privilege that we can bring to bear on that task.

The reasons why most of us aren’t out there changing the world are many: bad habits, limiting pessimistic attitudes, victimized patterns of thought. But none of these reasons are immovable facts of reality. We can change bad habits. We can cultivate an attitude of possibility. We can leave victimized, us-vs.-them thinking behind.

And we absolutely have to, because our ability to survive depends on our ability to evolve, deeply, now. We can’t hold onto old habits, old thought patterns, old ways of separating the world into buckets labeled “me” and “not me.” We have some major changing to do, fast.

Caring more is rational

We find ourselves alive in a universe that seems to be conducting some sort of experiment in possibilities. Atoms coalescing into planets and stars ... primitive life forms bubbling up in the sea ... music and space travel and ice cream ... this experiment has created some pretty incredible things.

When we connect with the deeply good direction it is moving in,  we start to care more about it and everything in it: trees, dolphins, stars, and even people who see the world differently from us.

And caring more is a good thing, because how much we care determines how much power, creativity, and strength we have available to us. A mother may find herself able to lift a truck off of her child, but she certainly couldn’t perform the same feat if it were a penny under the wheel instead. Love is what makes her strong. Caring makes the impossible possible.

Seeing change happen in real time

What if we endeavor to live up to everything we know? Can we confront our own bad habits, pessimistic ideas, and victimized patterns of thought? Is it possible to transform them?

In my experience, it’s tricky to say the least, and many times I fail. But every now and then, I succeed, and I get to see myself change—in real life, in real time, and with real people! This, more than anything else, shows me that the experiment is in our hands, and that we can be up to the task of guiding it. This is the ultimate rational basis for optimism.

If you are reading this right now, you have enormous power—the course of life on this planet is literally dependent upon your decisions and your actions. It isn’t easy learning to wield that power, nor to handle the responsibility that comes with it. But it is possible. We can change for the better. It’s largely a matter of deciding that we can, and we will.

Happy Friday, friends!

Today I wanted to point you to a “Can Do,” a great piece on Ben Franklin from And the Pursuit of Happiness, Maira Kalman’s blog on the NY Times site. In it, she looks into the genius of Ben Franklin, which was as much about pointed self-improvement as it was invention.

This part made me particularly happy: “I don’t think he was ever bored. He saw a dirty street and created a sanitation department. He saw a house burning down and created a Fire Department. He saw sick people and founded a hospital.”

And this: “Everything is invented. Language. Childhood. Careers. Relationships. Religion. Philosophy. The Future. They are not there for the plucking. They don’t exist in some natural state. They must be invented by people. And that, of course, is a great thing. Don’t mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American message.”

What will you invent today?

image courtesy of erix!

These are the questions that circle round my brain all day, every day. These are the questions we have to tackle if we want things to change.

1) Why are so many brilliant, wealthy, educated people—the luckiest, most powerful people ever to be born on the planet—stuck in apathy, despair, and anger about the future?

2) How do we get them unstuck so they can unleash their power and use their privilege to bring about transformation like nothing we’ve ever seen?

Why are these questions important? Because we (lucky, rich, educated people) have the responsibility to push things forward, and we’re not doing it, for a variety of reasons. How can we get beyond this? How can we make the transition from angry adolescent to mature and motivated adult?

I have lots of thoughts on these, but today I would like to hear yours.

image courtesy of ZeHawk

Several months ago, I bought a new brassiere. This is no ordinary bra—it is Italian, hand-made, and beautifully engineered. It cost about 5 times what I normally spend on bras. I call it The Magic Bra.

At the time, I felt very decadent dropping 3 figures on a single undergarment. The first few times I wore it, I showed the hot pink and gold lace appliqued straps to my friends and said, “Can you believe I spent so much money on this?” I had never bought such a fine item of lingerie before, and I felt pampered and gorgeous every time I put it on.

Love means that the novelty doesn’t wear off

Personal Development guru Steve Pavlina had a similar experience with some furniture that he and his wife bought for their home, and I love how he tells the story. Instead of setting a budget and choosing items to fit into it, they decided to get what they liked best up to a certain dollar amount. They weren’t able to furnish the entire house, but they didn’t compromise and ended up with items they love. He describes the difference:

When the furniture was delivered and set up in our home, I noticed that I felt much differently about it vs. how I used to feel about all our old hand-me-down furniture. I felt so appreciative of it. I was very grateful for it ...

To this day when I sit at our dining room table, I can’t help but notice what a nice table it is. Although we bought it two years ago, I never take it for granted. I still comment to Erin about what a great table it is. This surprises me. I’d have thought that by now, my enthusiasm for this table would have worn off, but it hasn’t. You’d figure I’d be accustomed to it by now. Nope. I feel grateful every time I sit down at it.

I had the same experience with my wildly expensive brassiere. I expected the novelty to wear off after a while, but now it’s almost a year later, and I still feel the same way about it. It sounds a little silly, I suppose, but I truly love this bra and the way it makes me feel. Consequently I take good care of it—other than one accidental incident, it has never seen the inside of a washer or a dryer. In fact, washing it out in the bathroom sink is a joy because it’s so well made. Every other bra I’ve ever owned looks gnarly after a few months, but this one looks as good as the day I bought it. It is truly magic!

“The everyday object is the monarch of all objects”

I thought of my beloved Magic Bra when I recently read Bruce Sterling’s last Viridian Design article, in which he talks about the changing face of consumerism in the 21st century. He suggests that our power to change the world lies at least partly in how we think about the things around us.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don’t seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It’s in your time most, it’s in your space most. It is “where it is at,” and it is “what is going on.”

The hedonic treadmill—to be resisted?

Sterling’s words make a lot of sense to me, and also make me think differently about the hedonic treadmill, also known as the phenomenon of getting used to excellent espresso to the point that you are no longer able to drink coffee from the gas station.

Many personal finance writers suggest trying to resist the hedonic treadmill. After all, if the only coffee you like is expensive and fancy, it can be harder to save money (not to mention getting yourself caffeinated on an interstate in Kansas). Articles on “how to be happier” often suggest the same thing: don’t ramp up your expectations, because you’ll have to keep doing so in order to attain the same level of contentment. Not to mention the environmental impact—where do you go when a Hummer isn’t big enough anymore?

Instead of MORE stuff, BETTER stuff—markedly better

But, it occurs to me that there’s another way to look at this. Perhaps the hedonic treadmill can work in our favor by raising the bar on what we expect from our purchases. Maybe we SHOULD get used to the most excellent, beautifully designed versions of what we need to buy anyway, so that we spend less money on thoughtless “dross.”

See, if I’d bought 5 crappy bras, they still wouldn’t have brought me the joy that one Magic Bra does. And now that I’ve seen what’s possible in bra technology, I can’t bring myself to pay any amount of money, no matter how small, for an inferior one. Instead I will wait and save up until I can afford another magical Magic Bra.

Now I’m the first to admit that my choice of lingerie is not a game-changer on a large scale. I also realize that most people are not in a position to buy the best of the best all the time—heck, I’m not either. But I think there is some merit in the idea of saving up for the best possible version of things we use every day.

Like, rather than buy 3 cheap sets of sheets, maybe I save up for one nice organic cotton set that wears like iron. Instead of burning through an unending stream of crappy “planned obsolescence” blenders, maybe I save up for a Vita-Mix. And even if sheets and a Vita-Mix are the only things I buy in the next year, maybe that will be far better than “economizing”—both for my day-to-day satisfaction and for the creation of a sustainable world based on quality rather than quantity.

The vision

Imagine going through life armed with well-designed tools, attired in lovely and longlasting clothes. You’d rarely have to go shopping, and you’d have less stuff to worry about, so you could live in a smaller, more intelligently designed home. Getting dressed would be a joy, like visiting beloved, beautiful, and dependable old friends. And without an errant underwire poking you in the ribs, you’d be free to think about bigger things, like how to best use your talents and your time on Earth for good instead of digging through bargain bins.

Sounds nice, right? And it’s doable—it’s just a matter of bringing thoughtfulness into the day-to-day and making the mundane magnificent.

Yesterday I spent some time catching up on my RSS feeds and came across a beautiful piece by sustainability consultant, writer, and musician Alan Atkisson about the Tällberg Forum, conference that looks into the question “How on Earth can we live together?” I read his six-part account and felt myself very moved by his experience. The problems we thought were very bad are actually much worse. And yet so many people are creating new solutions, new ways of seeing, and new methods of working together in response. Even with the incalculable challenges we face, the attitude toward making it right was, as one speaker said, “I certainly think we can, we must, and we will.”

In his speech, Amory Lovins made reference to a TED talk entitled “Willie Smits Restores a Rainforest,” which I’d like to share with you today. Using an integrated plan of clever plantings, high-tech monitoring, permaculture, and co-operation with local peoples, Smits and his team have been able to revitalize an almost-barren area in Borneo. Not only is the land now thriving, full of wildlife and biodiversity; it also supports the food, water, and economic needs of hundreds of families in the area. This reminded me of a speech given at the 350 Conference by Kevin Conrad, Special Envoy and Ambassador for Environment & Climate Change, in which he said that slowing climate change depends largely on increasing the economic value of a standing forest so there is no incentive to cut it down.

Smits’s story is compelling. The most amazing thing to me is the sacred responsibility he took upon his shoulders to care for the land, the animals, the people, and the planet all at once. I hope you enjoy it, and that it sparks ideas for you, as it did for me, about how much more responsibility you can take on, and how much useful, integrated beauty you can create in your own part of the world.

image courtesy of fontplaydotcom

In Derrick Jensen’s recent article in Orion Magazine, “Forget Shorter Showers: Why personal change does not equal political change,” he throws down the gauntlet for would-be activists in the 21st century in the very first paragraph:

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

He goes on to explain how our capitalist system wrongly puts the onus for protecting the natural environment on individuals and their consumption patterns, when the vast majority of waste and emissions are produced by industry and the military. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings.

The rest of the article explains the major problems with viewing lifestyle choice as the way to change the world, closing with this exhortation:

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

I couldn’t agree more with him that we need far bigger changes than new lightbulbs and shorter showers. Our lifestyle choices don’t have nearly the impact that the culture tells us they do. He makes many excellent points throughout the piece—please do go read it. But I stop short of full endorsement, because of his assessment of the solution. Is our only choice to “confront and take down” industrialized society? Is there no hope for development, for transformation?

He talks about how human beings are in a double-bind—a situation where there is no good choice and no way out—but, the way I see it, the point of view he espouses puts us there every bit as much as the industrial culture he so villainizes. If our only choices are to do nothing/lose everything, or to destroy modern civilization, then we truly are doomed.

Jensen is taking a vast leap. Our problems are not industry and capitalism; our problems are carbon emissions, wasted resources, and inequality. Rather than ripping down the whole system—which has brought unprecedented wealth, health, and education to millions of people—why not put our energies into recreating that system so that waste, emissions, and inequality are no longer a part of it? Isn’t there a chance that our ingenuity and creativity and capacity for growth can save us from the problems created by less developed versions of our ingenuity and creativity and capacity for growth?

We can read history as Jensen reads it—activists “taking down” systems of power. Or, we can look at it as a process of development in which swift, radical transformation is catalyzed by two concurrent and related forces: a problem to be solved, and a moral compulsion to solve it.

Brave people acting in the confluence of these two forces ended slavery; won women the right to vote; organized to protect workers’ rights; created a new way to view racial differences; and on and on. It’s important to note that none of these movements tore down what came before them. Rather, they achieved progress by appealing to the higher morality of the populace—a higher morality, I might add, that would never have been achieved without the increased level of material security and education brought about by industrialization.

Each of these movements pointed out a difference between the way things are and the way things could be, and awakened in millions of people the courage and capacity to bridge the gap. And this—internal moral development reflected in action—is how the world is changed, one step at a time, through a developmental process.

In short, not all personal change is useless. Taking a shorter shower might not appreciably change the world, but developing ourselves—our creativity and our sense of care for the whole of creation, oceans and industries and everything in between—certainly does. For it is only in embracing ever-broader points of view that we can see clearly enough to create new ways of living and thinking.

As we develop our capacity to see more deeply and more comprehensively, we also learn how to make our ideas meaningful to people who embrace different values. Just as not everyone who embraces traditional religious values is a bigot, not everyone who embraces capitalism is a moustache-twirling villain. We have to stop looking at this in such adversarial terms, and start seeing it as a process in which each of us—environmentalist, businessperson, mother, and soldier—has a part to play.

Calling for the destruction of modern society is a losing proposition. Calling for its redemption just might work.

image by erin MC hammer

The other night, my dear friend N. came over to hang out for a while. She told me that she’d been fighting a lot with her mother, a born-again Christian who watches a lot of Fox News, about politics. “What I don’t understand,” N. told me, “is the vitriol. She might disagree with Obama, or with me, but why does she have to be so hateful?”

Remembering several occasions on which N. had spewed her own venom in the opposite direction, especially during last fall’s election, I gingerly asked her how her rigid stance differed from her mother’s. “Aren’t you just as much of a fundamentalist about your beliefs as she is?”

We talked through this for the next hour or so. “They don’t believe in evolution so they want to teach theology in schools! They hang out in their little enclaves and won’t even listen to anyone who doesn’t agree with them! They won’t let up on the most asinine things!”

In each case, I saw the truth in what she was saying. And I also saw, with more clarity than ever before, that each of those statements could be applied to “our” side as well. From the religious right’s point of view, random, causeless, meaningless evolution is a form of religion—an atheistic one they don’t want their kids learning. Liberals also hang out in little enclaves, and have unwavering stances. We are all guilty of the same rigid way of thinking.

As we talked about it and shared our ideas, we both got some clarity on this, which felt to me like a tremendously good thing. Because fundamentalism of every stripe means stagnation, when what we need right now is an entirely unprecedented explosion of freely-moving, rapidly-evolving ideas.

This free exchange and evolution can only come about when each of us realizes that, in this immense and wondrous universe, there might be something more important than our being right. This in turn can give us the courage to let go of our fundamentalism and join our fellow humans in reality, where no one person or group has the entire monopoly on the truth.

So how do we get there? Here are some ideas.

• Stop the jerking knee and be curious. When someone puts forward an opinion contrary to yours, ask him about it. Find out what’s motivating it. So often we think we know what others are thinking and are completely wrong. You may be surprised to find that the motivation makes sense to you, even if the conclusion doesn’t.
• Make the heroic effort to put yourself in the other side’s shoes. For instance, I firmly believe in a woman’s right to choose, but when I really try to see it from the other side, their stance also makes perfect sense. From where they are sitting, abortion is murder, a denial of God’s will, and an immoral shutting off of possibility. Understanding and appreciating this makes me see that other solutions may be possible other than screaming at each other for perpetuity.
• Remember that it’s about learning, not about being right. If you have a really hard time shutting up about your own opinions long enough to listen, pretend you are an anthropologist studying a fascinating worldview different from your own. This can help you maintain some sort of professional objectivity.
• Keep in mind that every idea is eventually replaced by a better one. Millions of people all throughout history thought that the world was absolutely flat, that Earth was the center of the universe, and that owning slaves fit right in with the laws of nature. These examples should provide you with the humility and perspective to see that you alone of all of humanity are not 100% right about everything.
• Look for agreements and new ways of seeing. A great example of this is the work of Evolutionary Evangelist Michael Dowd. Instead of setting up evolution in one corner and religion in the other, then dinging the bell so they can duke it out, he stepped back and saw a way for each to enrich the other. He saw two oppositional forces—the theory of evolution and monotheistic religion—and found a way to synthesize them into a new understanding that includes and transcends both truths. Each of us has the power to do the same.

In an evolutionary world where everything is constantly changing, clinging to our ideas as if they are the only valid ones serves absolutely no purpose. It just stops the flow. Let’s lay down our fundamentalism and figure out a new way to talk about what’s important to us, a way that allows the new to emerge.

I grew up in a very strict Catholic background, and I loved many things about my Catholic faith—the community, the music, the beauty of Christ’s teachings. But I couldn’t reconcile my growing knowledge and ideas about the world with the dogma, and so when I left home, I left my Catholic upbringing behind in favor of science-based speculation about the way the universe works. At family get-togethers, I argued with my aunts and uncles late into the night, railing against their faith’s rigidity and oppressiveness.

Of course, my rants didn’t convince anyone of anything, and in fact I experienced some great losses taking this stance. Not only did it separate me from millions of people—including much of my family!—who do gain strength and perspective from their religious faiths; I also lost my sense of a Great Story I could believe in and learn from. If, as much of science tells us, we ended up here by accident, and our being here doesn’t particularly mean anything, then why even bother getting out of bed in the morning?

This story is pretty common, I think, and I know that lots of us feel the loss of a higher perspective. The proof is in our culture (insert your favorite example about how shallow we’ve become here).

But what if, instead of setting ourselves against each other, we could instead see from a higher perspective that makes it possible to embrace and integrate both religious and scientific revelations?

That’s the task to which Reverend Michael Dowd has dedicated his life. I’m currently reading his book “Thank God for Evolution” and it is truly awesome. In this interview, he explains how he got started in Evolutionary Evangelism and why every new fact science learns is good news. The interview gets really juicy right at the end; I wish they could have continued ...

image by Orin Optiglot

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
—Charles Darwin

And why should cultural evolution be any different? Indeed, looking at the major stages of human civilization we see that each emergence both solves problems of the previous stage and provides the “strife” needed for the next stage to emerge.

• Tribal consciousness, in which we were completely embedded in our tribal structures, led to the intense individuality of warrior culture.
• The brutality that developed out of warrior culture led to traditional cultures founded on the Great Faiths and reliant upon law and order.
• But traditional ways of seeing, in which religion dictated all the terms of reality, led to the rise of modernism, in which science and rationality took over as the primary lenses through which we view the world.
• In turn, the strifes of modernism—imperialism, oppression, and all the problems caused by the pursuit of unchecked material wealth—provided the raw material for postmodernism, and now many of us make meaning of the world from its egalitarian, inclusive, non-hierarchical values.
• Now we are beginning to see the pathologies of postmodernism as well—moral relativism, extreme narcissism, and ultra-differentiation so intense that we violently disagree with people who share 95% of our values.

The question now is, out of these problems, out of this strife, where will we go next? Where will this flowering process of ever-more-complex pathologies and ever-higher resolutions lead us? These folks have some pretty good ideas about it, but ultimately, it’s up to us—each of us and all of us—to decide.

Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
—Henry David Thoreau

image by psd

On my recent roadtrip, I discovered many things: I love to hike, everything tastes better when cooked outdoors, and living minimally is wonderful.

Having fewer choices, less stuff, and few obligations made for very easy decision-making. What do I wear? Whatever’s clean. What’s for breakfast? Oatmeal and tea, just like yesterday. What to do? Well, the weather’s nice, so let’s go for a hike. This was all deliciously simple.

One side effect of this minimalism was that I had plenty of room in my head for noticing beautiful things and thinking deep thoughts, which are among my favorite pasttimes. I liked the empty space, and I started wondering, how can I get more of it? What if I could have it all the time?

By the time I got back to New York, my intention was clear: I was going to downsize my stuff, reduce my expenses, and simplify my life. Within a few days, I had found a new place to live with a new friend.

This was a somewhat scary decision. I was at a low point when I moved into this beautiful apartment, and it gave me the safe environment I needed to figure things out and reinvent myself. I might even venture to say that my years here have been the happiest of my life.

But my happiness isn’t dependent on one specific flat, especially one that takes up so much of my paycheck and my time. I’m moving to free up more of both of those precious resources so I can put them towards whatever is next on the horizon. Put another way, I want to simplify and grow.

Of course part of me is hesitant to leave, and I will dearly miss many things about this place—the church bells I can hear from my bed, the gorgeous cabinetry and woodwork, the beautiful little yard. At the same time, I’m also looking forward to spending time with my new roommate, socking away a good bit of cash, and having more ideas than stuff. I have a feeling that my new home will be every bit as inspiring as this one has been.

So, the big move happens in about 6 weeks. In the meantime, I’m selling things and spending as much time in the garden as I can. Today I lay on a sheet looking up at the trees, and I felt pretty darn lucky overall.

Have you ever downsized to free up energy and money? What was your experience? Let us know in the comments.

Well, I’m back home in Brooklyn after a truly amazing month on the road. I’m still processing everything I saw—in nature and in myself—and thinking about options that hadn’t occurred to me before. Changes are afoot in so many different areas—work, home, and even in the way I think about the world. My urge right now is to clear the decks for what’s coming next and to absorb as many new ways of thinking and relating as I can. As always, I will do my best to share this with you on The Sunny Way in hopes that my experience and ideas might be useful to you.

To that end, today I’d like to share with you a presentation by designer Matt Webb, in which he explores what it can mean to be a human being right now. He believes that our special superpower at this point in time is to participate in cultural creation in a way we’ve never been able to before. I can’t say too much more about it, because he covers so much ground so beautifully. Do yourself a favor and watch this today! It will change your weekend and, possibly, the way you see yourself in general.

image by mrhayata

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the hypercritical part of me went on overdrive the first week or so of my trip. Everywhere I went, I saw stuff to judge and snark upon, and I realized that this was both limiting my experience and making me mean, so I decided to stop.

I did pretty well with this overall—not perfect, but pretty good—and I noticed something interesting as I chose to put my attention on lovelier things. Not only did I have a much better time with my fellow tourists; I also saw much more of what was around me and had many more ideas. When I focused on how annoying everyone was, I saw many more things to be annoyed by. But when I opened up to all the beauty around me, creative possibilities seemed to flow through me.

Could it be that a positive attitude makes us more creative? That’s not how I usually think of creativity—the paradigm is “tortured artist” for a reason. Isn’t it the awful gap between what they see in the world and what they see in their minds that fuels their creative power?

Turns out that’s not the case at all. In fact, recent research shows that bad feelings restrict your attention—like when an eyewitness to a crime can remember what the gun looked like but not the person holding it—while good feelings literally expand what you are able to take in.

I read about this research in Rapt, a book by Winnifed Gallagher which looks into the essence of attention and how cultivating it can improve our lives. Here she describes one of the experiments that shows the power of focusing on positive or negative feelings.

Subjects ... are first asked to look at a visual display’s central object. However, if they’re then prompted to feel a positive emotion, such as gratitude, they proceed to take in significant peripheral material, despite the earlier instruction. In contrast, subjects remain in a neutral or negative state continue to focus on the display’s central element and tune out the surrounding stimuli.

Of course, it makes sense that negative feelings would pull so much focus—as she goes on to explain, “in a potentially ominous situation, homing in on and reacting to any trouble quickly is more important than taking your time to get the big picture.”

And this makes sense if the trouble is a wild boar or a speeding car bearing down upon you. But for big picture problems like the ones we are facing today, this laserlike focus on what’s wrong functions only to limit our options and create despair.

Intuitively many of us have known this for a while, but it’s good to have scientific evidence to support the fact that maintaining a positive focus is absolutely crucial to creating new, clean, just ways to live, both in our individual lives and collectively.

How do we cultivate this positive focus? Like math, skateboarding, and playing piano, it’s easier for some of us than it is for others. My natural optimism set point is quite high, even though my Gen X conditioning also makes me a little too fond of the snark.

But it has more to do with intention and desire than whether you were born a Tigger or an Eeyore. I think it’s possible for all of us to become more grateful, more open, and more hopeful. We’ll explore different ideas for how to open up the positivity valves over the next few weeks—Rapt has a lot of great ideas.

There are marathons and bike-a-thons and walk-a-thons, but on Sunday, June 22, Riverbrook Residence in Stockbridge, MA hosted what may be the world’s first Piano Improv-a-thon!

Riverbrook, the oldest facility for women for developmental disabilities in New England, is where I teach music. In collaboration with Riverbrook director Joan Burkhard and the many wonderful people on the staff, this event helped fulfill my aspiration to show that, no matter who we are, beauty is inherent to us all by virtue of being human.

Over the course of the afternoon, people of all ages, backgrounds and levels of musical experience—including many of the Riverbrook women—improvised with me on the beautiful Samick grand piano that graces the Riverbrook living room.

The Piano Improv-a-thon was a fundraiser for the Riverbrook music program, which is giving women with developmental disabilities a powerful and transformative means of self-expression. We raised almost $4500—far more than anticipated.

The Improv-a-thon performers collected pledges for their participation from family, friends, and colleagues. (For example, many of my husband’s fellow teachers at Taconic High School supported his participation in the event.) Contributions also came from dozens of individuals and businesses throughout the Berkshires, the Hilltown area and beyond. The Red Lion Inn, The Taggart House, Bardwell, Bowlby and Karam Insurance, Consolati Insurance, Boston Seafoods, Zabian’s Jewelers, Guido’s Marketplace, Once-Upon-a-Table restaurant, were among the many who donated.

Children as young as four years old participated, as did some the Riverbrook women and many of my older students. As you’ll hear in the audio clips below, each improvisation was completely individual. Yet, a seamless connection arose among all those present. We were experiencing what was occurring from that deeper level where beauty arises.

Riverbrook is a rare and special place for women with disabilities. It is an environment where beauty and interconnectivity can flourish among everyone who walks through its doors. As improvisation released the creative impulse in each participant, an unusual alchemy of music, ease and freedom emerged that afternoon. I actually think this was a world’s first!

Here is a sample of the twenty-four Riverbrook Improv-a-thon performers. Click on “audio recording” to hear their performances. More photos and audios are coming—stay tuned!

Nancy Babcock, Worthington, MA

Nancy studied piano for a short time when she was a girl, but was told that she had “no musical talent.”

Click here for audio recording

Carol Ray, Riverbrook Residence

Carol has lived at Riverbrook for many years and is beloved by residents and staff alike. Carol expresses her exuberant relationship to life through playing music and dancing. She participated in our performance, “Flying Free: Music without Limits.”

Click here for audio recording

Isabella DeFelice, Richmond, MA

Isabella is four years old. Her two sisters and brother—Gabriella, Daniella and Dominic—study piano with me. Isabella is just beginning. Our occasional forays into music are entirely improvisational.

Click here for audio recording

Tracy Salvadore, Riverbrook Residence

Tracy loves singing and playing the piano. Occasionally, when we’re improvising something upbeat, a staff member or resident will start dancing to our music. This gives Tracy great joy and amusement!

Click here for audio recording

Frieda Pilson, Chappaqua, NY and Richmond, MA

Frieda has played piano for much of her life. Classically trained, she longed to free her creative musical voice. She began studying with me a number of years ago and now improvises freely, as well as composing her own strikingly original piano pieces.

Click here for audio recording

Tom Weeks, Southfield, MA

Tom works for the New York Life Insurance Company. He sings with the Berkshire Choral Festival and has a beautiful tenor voice. Tom began studying piano with me in 2008. His improvisations have a distinctly “vocal” quality: beautiful melodies are always emerging from him!

Click here for audio recording

Bram Fisher, Richmond, MA

Bram and his brother, Satchel, both study piano with me and play in the school band. They clearly love music! Each boy has a distinctly individual sensibility, as expresed in their performances of jazz and blues pieces and familiar songs, improvisations, and their Garageband compositions.

Click here for audio recording

Tanny Labshere, Riverbrook Residence

Tanny and I played a semi-improvised interpretation of “We Shall Overcome” and “America the Beautiful.” Two weeks prior, we had played this duet for Governor Deval Patrick.

Click here for audio recording

More photos and recordings from the Riverbrook Piano Improv-a-thon are coming soon—stay tuned!

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is a huge, controversial book which tells the story of a group of creative people who go on strike to protest their treatment by the rest of society. Widely regarded as a right-wing screed, it’s spawned millions of college libertarians and inspired countless debates about the proper relationship between individuals, business, and government.

Those on the political left generally disdain it for the harsh attitude it takes toward the poor—that they are mostly lazy, easily manipulated, and not all that bright—and toward the intellectual elite, who Rand characterizes as bitterly hell-bent on bringing down any great achievements. And it’s true that Rand’s philosophy goes a bit far in many ways, especially in her descriptions of “the masses” and her idolization of industry. But there’s a great deal of truth and beauty in this book as well, and that’s what I’d like to explore.

In all of her books, Rand puts forward the idea that all true progress comes from a small number of exceptional individuals—mainly captains of industry—and that their achievements must not be fettered in any way by government regulation. Most discussions of her work focus on this facet of her philosophy. In essence, she is defending the modernist ideals of individualism, progress, rationality, and achievement from the postmodern ideas beginning to emerge at the time she was writing.

Postmodernity began largely as a reaction to the excesses of modernity—the way it marginalizes non-Western cultures, sees the rest of the world as resources to be tapped in the name of “progress”, and values material wealth above all else. In widening the circle of which stories are considered important in our culture, postmodernity has indeed brought many wonderful and important things into the world: environmentalism, the women’s movement, and Civil Rights. But at the same time, it has also trashed the real achievements of modernity, the same achievements upon which it stands. In her work, Rand is reacting, in her own historical milieu, to these postmodern pathologies.

Of course, we are more than 50 years on from her era now, and we can see the effects of unfettered, unregulated capitalism—environmentally, economically, and socially. From our vantage point, it’s obvious that dropping all governmental regulation is not the answer to what ails us.

But there’s another part of Rand’s philosophy that I think holds a lot of promise for human evolution, and that is her deep reverence for what it means to be a human being on Earth. I believe this is her major contribution to philosophy, and it’s what I love about her work.

She sees humankind not as a scourge upon the planet, but as life’s most beautiful expression. The human mind—our capacity to make decisions and act on them—sets us apart from other forms of life, and Rand recognizes and celebrates this fact.

In doing so, she also sees beyond the fundamental distinction our culture makes between spirit and matter. She rejects the idea that matter is dirty and crass, and that only selfless spiritual pursuits are pure. Instead, she says that one is indivisible from the other; that, indeed, matter is an expression of soul. And so the human ability to manipulate matter makes it both powerful and sacred.

In one of the best chapters in the book, Dagny Taggart, our protagonist, has managed to build a superfast railroad using a revolutionary new alloy developed by metals tycoon Hank Rearden. Public opinion is vehemently against her—What if it collapses? And, even if it doesn’t, what right does she have to do something in a completely new way? But, of course, the rail holds, even pulling a huge weight of freight cars across a slender bridge at unprecedented speeds. On the train’s first journey, Dagny goes into the engine room to marvel at the machines that can do so much, and the force of mind that created them:

The motors were are moral code cast in steel … They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power – of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form … Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should that soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going—not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again—not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages—the power of a living mind—the power of thought and choice and purpose.

As I recently re-read this passage, I realized that, at our own time in history, we absolutely must reconnect with this sense of confidence and reverence towards our own abilities as human beings. Oil isn’t the fuel of growth and progress – we are!

I also thought a bit differently about Rand’s economic ideas than I had in the past, when my knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss them out of hand. Of course I still don’t believe she has the whole answer, but the germ of something useful and real is there.

Rand’s characters live not to simply consume experiences or to amass wealth, but to create things of value. Value is what Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, John Galt, Francisco d’Anconia, and all the other strikers seek to create. They want to exchange the fruits of their labor with others who have created real value in their own ways. And it is through this free exchange of valuable works that true freedom and progress come into being.

Later in the book, Dagny stumbles upon the village established by John Galt, where all the strikers congregate for one month out of the year to live in accordance with their beliefs. After seeing her colleagues and rivals drop out of a cultural landscape that punishes their desire to create, she is now reunited with each of them, one-by-one, and they introduce her to their new ventures in the valley.

She’s stunned that they have given up so much—multi-million-dollar, world-wide enterprises—to start over again on the smallest possible scale, with nothing but their hands and the land around them, but they see it differently. One of them explains it to her this way: “Here, we trade achievements, not failures—values, not needs. We’re free of one another, yet we all grow together. Wealth, Dagny? What greater wealth is there than to own your own life and spend it on growing?”

Atlas Shrugged reflects the tumultuous time in which Ayn Rand lived, as a new way of thinking about the world – postmodernism—began to question what came before it. Her prescience in identifying the postmodern worldview’s pathologies is remarkable. In her defense of modernism, she also reflects its highest values. And as we endeavor to recreate the world we live in, it can only help to revisit these values: to see the sacred preciousness of our own consciousness, and to believe in the possibility of genuine, evolutionary progress.

This is a guest post by Esther Kassovicz, updating us on the progress of her project to build bridges between Israeli and Palestinian women, which she first told us about a few months ago in an 11 Questions survey. Fill out the survey and let us know what you are up to! We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

We’ve had a few meetings since my last update, both separately in our respective places and together. I’d like to share with you about a couple of them that I believe can illustrate the complexity of the larger scale situation and also why I’m convinced more than ever that holding space for communication is our best ‘strategy’ forward.

A couple of weeks ago we had our West Bank meeting scheduled. We were all very excited and nervous. For us Israelis crossing the check point into the West Bank is against the law, through there is a way to do it if we get stopped that’s pretty much safe and straight forward. We were however bracing for the unpleasant experience of witnessing ourselves the often humiliating and frustrating experience Palestinians endure daily in using the check points. We wanted to experience it ourselves to possibly understand what it’s like for the Palestinian women.  Also the Palestinian women who are Israeli citizens from the North of Israel were all excited as they don’t get to be in direct contact with Palestinians across the ‘green line.’

However passing the check point went quite smoothly, and after crossing the ugly and menacing famous wall into the West Bank was like having landed in a foreign country—even though I had been there in my childhood before the Intifada. The city was bustling and the development and ongoing building sites very noticeable.  The biggest surprise however was that besides our host and the group’s facilitator, the Palestinian women from the larger group didn’t show up to the meeting although it was on their own ‘turf.’ We kept hoping that they’re held up by their work or something; we didn’t get any notification and we had no idea why they never made it. We all tried figuring out what could have happened, and for the rest of the meeting we tried finding out from our few hosts what it’s like in the occupied territories that could possibly create such a strange occurrence, especially since the Arab culture is renowned for its hospitality, it was incomprehensible also for the rest of the Israeli Palestinian women who were even more offended than we were. Even in retrospect, though we were told there were some issues in the group and some miscommunication, we still don’t completely know what happened and there hasn’t really been direct communication between us.  We have heard from their facilitator that they still wish to continue, and there are even a few more women joining, so we’ll see how we’ll regain a fundamental trust in all our intentions to continue this process. 

The connection with the Israeli Palestinian women though continues to tighten—what to do, the fact that we don’t have a real border barrier goes a long way, and we can even use the same language—they all speak Hebrew. We had a beautiful time with them as they brought the ingredients to make a really gorgeous vegetarian lunch, which we then mixed together, which was very unifying (see attached picture.) Next weekend we’ll meet in their village and we very much hope the women from the West Bank will be able to get their ‘crossing’ permits into Israel by then. Otherwise we’ll meet again in Talitha Kumi where they can get to without needing to cross through Israeli territory.

I’d also love to share my own personal experience of freedom to connect with the Palestinian women from the North of Israel. One day I met one of them after her work in Haifa, and we couldn’t stop talking so she invited me over to stay over in her village to continue. Little did I know that all the women in the group lived in the same neighborhood and when they heard I came to visit, each of them came by and wanted me to show their house. So I visited about 5 or 6 beautiful homes, drank at least 5 cups of Turkish coffee, and juice and cake—you cannot refuse the hospitality. I was received so warmly by everyone’s family in the Muslim village, that my embarrassing inability to converse in Arabic didn’t create a barrier even with the older generation.

Then my friend surprised me last weekend when she called me from Tel Aviv, since she was facilitating the mixed Palestinian and Israeli youth and they were staying walking distance from me. So we got together and all she wanted felt like doing is to stroll in the streets of Tel Aviv that I learned to my surprised she hasn’t really seen much of before.  She is a remarkably independently thinking woman, defining herself almost as an anarchist and a radical feminist, basically daring to interpret the Koran herself, from a woman’s perspective and letting anyone stop her being a good Muslim in her way. I very much admire her spirit and courage, and empathize with the incredible effort she makes to accomplish little things that we take for granted. As outspoken and mature and courageous as she is, she can’t freely decide to live on her own, away from her family unless she marries regardless of her education and internal freedom of thought. But she’s not blaming anyone, she’s ready to take it on—one-pointedly focused to succeed regardless of the many obstacles she’s encountering—in her own culture and ours.

However our bond is empowering for both of us simultaneously. I feel how her rebel spirit connects us for life, and I genuinely wish her success without feeling threatened by it in any way on the contrary. I know how inspiring our coming together is—not only personally to both of us—but to women everywhere. We are consciously leaning into a new possibility of friendship and support that together we may more effectively forge sane new ways to make the ‘impossible possible.’

Book recommendation: To gain appreciation for what it takes for Muslim women outside of the US to gain their personal expression of freedom, I warmly recommend reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book named Infidel which is a striking autobiography of a very bold and courageous Somali woman whose success still bugs a lot of Muslims around the world.

Over the last month, I’ve been reading Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants by Wolfgang Schivelbusch.  It sat in my bookcase for a while, unread, and then last fall I listened to a webcast about enlightened communication where the organizer began the program connecting enlightened communication to the conversations that arose in coffeehouses in 17th century England and France. I decided to see what this book had to say.

In Tastes of Paradise, Schivelbusch writes about the links between new foods brought to Europe through trade with the Middle East, the Far East and the Americas.  He covers the effects that pepper, coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, beer, hard liquor and opium had on European culture from the 17th through 19th centuries.

The most interesting and compelling substance that Schivelbusch writes about is coffee, which was introduced through the Middle East into several ports:  Venice, Marseilles, London, and Amsterdam.  Coffee was a medicinal food before the 15th century.  It wasn’t till this time that Islamic cultures roasted, ground and brewed the beans into the bitter drink we know today. It was quickly adopted by the non-alcoholic drinking Islamic culture.

I want to focus in on how the Bourgeois of England and France were ripe to adopt coffee as their drink of choice and how the mindset of the early Enlightenment was supported by coffee, which was a stark difference from the previous drink of choice: ale, beer and wine.  According to Schivelbusch, before the introduction of the potato, beer and ale represented the second most consumed foods in central and northern Europe. These drinks played an important role in the demonstration of loyalty and friendship through drinking contests and toasts. Men gathered to compete at drinking and worked themselves into a frenetic state from cheering and glass raising.  In the book, there are many illustrations showing the height of tavern inebriation, including a drinker depicted with the head of an animal, vomiting, and Demon Alcohol in the background orchestrating the events.

The introduction of coffee was seen as a soberer of an alcohol dependent society.  The overconsumption of alcohol in taverns was associated with incompetence and laziness.  The Protestant Reformation spurred the criticism of alcohol and its customs.  Coffee was welcomed by the English especially as an illuminator, a substance to wake up humanity,  “…Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with a flash of truth…”

It’s interesting how coffee was first utilized by different strata of society too.  The Aristocracy enjoyed coffee for its superficial accouterments—the porcelain cups and coffee pot, the particular way to drink it—but the middle class valued coffee for its practical aspects. It was seen to stimulate the intellect, support an increasing shift to indoor, mental labor in an office, and extension of the work day.

Coffee also became the official drink of the emerging capitalist economy. In England, circa 1700, there were roughly 3,000 coffeehouses in London alone, which works out to about one for every 200 people.  Initially, these were places where merchants and insurance brokers gathered to discuss business, but increasingly became places to discuss art, politics and literature.  Coffeehouse etiquette was the opposite of Tavern behavior.

Coffee is interesting to me for two reasons:

• As a study into the role that food has on culture. Did coffee itself stimulate the Age of Enlightenment, or did the rational thinking of the Enlightenment lead to new patterns of consumption? Although it’s a bit of a chicken/egg question, the latter is more true. Europeans’ desire to create a new culture spurred the coffeehouse as a new gathering place and the coffeehouses in turn encouraged a culture of dialogue which influenced literature, philosophy, art and politics.
• As background for an inquiry into the relationship that we have with food today.  From personal experience, I can see that the more physically fit I become, the less I want to eat very heavy foods, meat and carbs.  This is true for many of us who want to develop our physical health and are changing our food consumption patterns.  I’m looking for major shifts in our culture about the way we eat.  What is emerging in our consciousness that would be supported and positively enhanced by something concrete?  Will it come from certain foods or certain ways of eating?  I don’t know and I’m interested in finding out. 

It’s not every day that the Vice President of the United States stands less than a foot away from you, gives you a disarmingly warm hello and a very firm handshake!  Thanks to a dear friend, Bernard L. Jones, that’s exactly what I experienced a few days ago.

Bernard, a Democratic State delegate from Colrain and Vietnam combat veteran, had invited me to a special reception in Boston for Vice President Joe Biden. Together with several hundred other people on the roof deck of Fenway Park, I listened to the Vice President speak about the issues confronting this new administration. He described his visits to hard-hit industrial communities throughout the United States and the economic necessity for health care reform. His speech was sober, personal, and finally…uplifting. Not in an impractical or hyperbolic way. His optimism was authentic, real.

I was hoping to hand him a DVD of my piano duets with the women of Riverbrook Residence. Through the medium of music, women with disabilities are exemplifying—emotionally, cognitively and socially—the spirit of change he and the new administration stand for. I knew that the Vice President would find this work meaningful and inspiring—just as Governor Deval Patrick had the week before!

As I learned from a Secret Service agent, however, no one is permitted to hand the Vice President anything, except perhaps a business card. So I gave my packet of materials to another friend, Michael Wilcox, through whose connections we hope to deliver it to the Vice President.

My aspiration is for the Riverbrook women to be recognized at a national level. Specifically, I imagine them performing in the First Lady’s new White House Music Series. They will help make the White House the “People’s House”—as First Lady Michelle Obama is seeking to do.

Through their music, these women, who in other circumstances may have been relegated to the fringes of society, are inspiring people throughout Massachusetts. They demonstrate why the optimism Vice President Biden expressed the other night is justified—they prove that beauty, creativity and freedom are our nature, inherent to us all and unfettered by any limitation!

A few months ago, on a retreat with spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, he spoke for a while about love and trust. Love, he said, is vague—you can love ice cream, your dog, your spouse, and God, without really making any distinctions between them.

We also get sloppy with people we love, he said, and I recognized this to be true. Of course, there is something beautiful in feeling free to share our vulnerabilities, but too often this ease turns into taking each other for granted. In many cases, we end up being our worst selves with those who are closest to us, rationalizing that they will love us anyway, and that we deserve to be loved just the way we are.

But is that true? When our lives are expressions of selfishness, or when we lash out at our loved ones because we can, or when we live out of our lowest desires, is that behavior worthy of love? Maybe it isn’t. And, Cohen said, maybe trust is a better measure of our regard for each other than the amorphous concept of love.

Unlike love, which says, “You are perfect just as you are,” trust says, “I know that you are capable of incredible things, and I trust you to make the effort.” We might love despite or even because of our faults, but we trust in one another’s integrity, honesty, and willingness to keep trying. Trust can be earned, and it can be destroyed. It is conditional, and that is what makes it so precious. We may generically love everyone, but not everyone is worthy of trust. The question, then, is, are we trustworthy? Do the people who believe in us have good reason to continue to do so?

Since the retreat, I’ve thought a lot about this, and I realized that most of my relationships are built on the amorphous idea of love rather than trust. I love many people, but the number I trust is much lower. More importantly, I think about the people I am closest with and wonder—can they trust me? When I say I will do something, do they need to take my words with a grain of salt? Do I teach people to believe what I say, or to wait and see what happens? I am working to develop integrity, and to be more and more trustworthy every day, but I recognize that I still have a long way to go.

These thoughts about trust came back to me the other day, as I sat on a rock on a beach in Northern California. This is easily one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been—a half-circle of cliffs surrounding a small patch of golden sand, trees bending a hundred feet over cobalt blue waters that crash and dissolve into silvery specks in the sunshine. A waterfall trickles out of one of the cliffs, and lush yellow flowers seem to explode from its edges as the water runs over rocks and forms pools all the way down to the sea.

As I sat and let all this sink into me, I realized that nature can be trusted. Rivers will generally find their way to the ocean; life will almost always appear where sunlight meets water. Moreover, nature can be trusted to create beauty as it creates life systems. Nothing in this gorgeous landscape was planned; it came together through time and the consistent workings of simple forces—wind, rock, sand, sea. Seagulls don’t ride the wind just to make a beautiful picture for me to appreciate—they do it to get their supper—but the beauty is created nonetheless.

Throughout human history, we have endeavored to dominate nature, to control and manipulate it to our own ends. And, of course, we had to learn to do this: how could the great achievements of humankind—artistic, scientific, spiritual, political—have happened without some level of material security and comfort?

But in our attempts to dominate, we lost our sense of trust. We began to think of nature as an accessory to our ever-more-comfortable lifestyles rather than the foundation upon which we and everything we know are built. At this point, now that we can see the complexity and the consequences of the situation we’ve created, the question is, how do we regain that trust? And how do we locate a new, higher sense of trustworthiness within ourselves, so that we can fully participate in nature’s creative process?

I know it is there. I know it is there because the same forces that created the immeasurable beauty of the exploding flower waterfall also brought me to it, with the capacity to see and care for it. The inherent beauty of nature is the inherent beauty of me and of each of us. Only our ideas about who we are keep us from realizing this.

Can we lay down our suspicion, and work to build lives with nature rather in domination of it? Can we become as trustworthy as the water that will inevitably get to the sea? Can we trust that life is fundamentally good, and that the process ultimately works, even if we sometimes can’t see the big picture?

If we can, then maybe our lives can become expressions of both trust and love—a circle of care that goes wider and deeper than anything we can imagine right now. Maybe unconditional love is not about caring for a small number of people without condition, but rather about loving the entirety of the process we are part of without reservation.

It’s so great to hear from Jessica on her work with the women of Riverbrook Residence. What is possible is so much more than we think, and it’s wonderful that she and her students were able to share this in such a real sense with Governor Patrick. Thanks, Jessica! -ed.

What an amazing night! A few nights ago, my blind student Tanny Labshere and I had the opportunity to play a piano duet for the Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. For the occasion—a small fundraising party at a private home—we created a special medley of “We Shall Overcome” and “America the Beautiful.” At the last chord, there was a palpable absorption in the room - everyone was completely focused on our playing. People were deeply moved.

Tanny’s adoptive mother, Paula Labshere, was there and she was thrilled. We both had an opportunity to express to the Governor the ways in which the State had made it possible for Tanny to grow and thrive. It had given her life-changing opportunities: through the foster program she was placed with a loving family who eventually adopted her; Tanny attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind; and now she was at Riverbrook Residence in Stockbridge, MA, which is a model of care for women with disabilities. That’s where I teach her music.

Like anyone in government these days, the Governor is grappling with extraordinary challenges. At the event, he spoke about the multi-billion dollar cut in the state budget and, as a result, the hard decisions he’s having to make. I thought, it’s important for him to see what’s working, and how significant it is. State programs and facilities in Massachusetts had made it possible for a young woman like Tanny—who was born into great difficulty—to ultimately express the freedom and beauty Governor Patrick had just witnessed. His response was wonderful. He was clearly moved by what he had just heard. It was a very special moment!

image by Llima

Over the last four months I have been part of a fitness challenge group spurred by Uli, a friend through this site. In February, Megan and I joined her and Brad in their $50/week exercise commitment challenge. Since then, my friend Siobhan has joined us. As Uli wrote about the structure of the group, the group holds us accountable to our goals, and we’ve all experienced a lot of growth through the process.

Not too long ago, Megan wrote about the tremendous positive physical and non-physical changes she has seen in her body and beyond. I have seen changes in my physical body, too, and that’s been so refreshing and a big encouragement for me to continue. But the biggest shift I have made through this challenge of fitness is that I am now starting to understand the importance of consistency. The importance I now place on making time for regular physical activity is what has been most transformative for me.

I was thinking about how to express this—how can I describe a new realization of my body’s potential, what word would I pick to express the new found sense of energy that I feel moving in my day and more so, the hope I see about other areas of my life that I can transform? Reverence is the word that I’d choose for the profound respect I have for my physical body in all its amazing capacity to develop and become more than I can imagine. According to Webster’s online dictionary, one of the meanings of reverence is:  “profound, adoring, awed respect.” This accurately conveys what I feel about the surprise and joy that comes from seeing my body get stronger, leaner, and straighter from regular workouts. I also have gratitude for all the different types of exercise I can engage in. This past week I tried out two at home Pilates videos, and I have increased my speed and duration in running. 

Before joining this fitness challenge group, I used to think that I could only exercise when I had extra time or on the weekends. As a result, I exercised sporadically and I had 3 different clothing sizes in my closet; big clothes for when I got chubby and thin clothes for my life with exercise. But as I’ve gotten older, I find that I really like to exercise, and it helps me relax and stay focused mentally. The big challenge was making time for it. Our commitment group has helped me to block out times to workout and to mimic the Nike slogan, “Just Do It.” I found that I tend to spend more time worrying about it or wondering about fitting it into my schedule. I still worry, and kvetch, but now push it aside more and more so I can get going, get out and workout.

Since committing to exercise for four hours per week, I now value exercise as an integral part of my life, just as important as work, school, and socializing. Making the choice to exercise is a choice to put positive action ahead of negative complaining or doubt in the unknown. It’s a truly great step in the right direction.

Exercise grounds all parts of my being together: physical, mental, emotional, and moral. I have found that it is the most efficient action I can take—at least right now it is—to catapult me out of a stinkin’ thinkin’ perspective. It shows me a different perspective very quickly. When I workout and I’m sweaty and really trying as best I can, I break the cyclical limiting thoughts momentarily. They do come back, they always come back, but I’m learning more and more that they’re not the truth, there’s always another perspective, to keep an open mind and to just chill out rather than jump to an interpretation that makes a problem out of someone or something.

Through this commitment I’ve made to myself and four other people the wall of busyness and excuses I have made for not pursuing greatness in my life are being worn down through exercise and checking in about it weekly with them. In the last couple of months, I’ve started to notice friends and acquaintances of mine who already do make exercise part of their normal life. It’s not only when they “have time” or “feel like it.” It really is all the time, as important as everything else, with some slowing down when it’s appropriate—like during sickness or some huge project at work, or moving.

I have had slips. I fell short on my hours twice and had to pay the penalty, 50 bucks. But it’s helped me value the practice of workouts, and scheduling time to take care of my physical health in an ongoing way, not just for a brief period of time but as part of daily life. The biggest former obstacle that I overcame was fitting in exercise during busy times. I managed to workout during my spring semester finals. One week I did fall short and had to pay because I was sick and didn’t tell anyone. Out of this came a conversation that it’s fine to decrease hours for sickness if I communicate this to another member during the week, not after. 

I started running last July and have kept it up for nearly a year. Now, I’ve become faster and I think it’s time to change my running routine from track running to street running. Exercise greatly benefits my mental focus and keeps my body relaxed, when I tend to get anxious. Last week I had a breakthrough during an Abs workout.  I really worked through each movement and afterwards my back was much stronger and I was easily able to stand up straight. That’s the day I made the connection with the foods I eat, and saw that the foods I choose affect my workouts. Fruits and veggies support greater physical activity. A bonus of exercising is that the more fit I become, the more easily I find it to cut out the sweets, the sugar, and overeating because they don’t support my body. Either I feel tired and heavy or I get a stomach ache and this inhibits my exercise and the enjoyment and energy that come from it. Splurging is okay, I’ve found, if done infrequently, when appropriate like when I’m out to dinner or when the dessert is top notch and is satisfying on multiple levels—taste, quality, atmosphere and shared conversation.

Another thing I am learning is how to accept that my flexibility and energy level will change due to various factors like sleep or time of the month and not to make a sweeping negative self-judgment about it. Rather, I am learning to follow-through, stay focused on specific movements of my workout, and let go of the results.

Another cool thing is my perspective on being pushed and pushing others is changing. Two weeks ago, I got up to go running, kind of groggy and stiff and not wanting to go. On the walk over, the streets were quiet and sleepy, the sun refracting off the dew on the grass and trees. I finally arrived at the high school track where I usually run and there was this whole entire group of people that I had forgotten about—the physically fit runners, walkers and chatty soccer moms, yelling coaches and chirping children all exercising or supporting young athletes. I thought, yeah this is the culture I want to be part of, the people who value working out. At one point, I saw a soccer coach yell at his players, “Move it, Move it, Leeett’sss Goooo!!” A short while back,  I would have thought that he was being unnecessarily harsh,  but I started laughing, thinking about how I often push myself to get moving,  knowing well that most times, unless we don’t do this for ourselves and others,  we won’t develop in a real, measurable, and completely inspiring way.

image by Maximum Mitch

This is a guest post by Nancy Fisher, a healer and dear friend from Long Island, NY.

On Monday May 18th, The Alliance for a New Humanity (ANH) and Intersections International hosted the Be the Change Community Outreach Program at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. For those unable to attend the event was streamed on the web.

With presentations by Deepak Chopra, president of the ANH, and the Rev. Robert Chase, Director of Intersections International, the evening promised to be a passionate and interesting ride. And it didn’t fail to deliver.

The ANH mission is to ‘connect people, who, through personal and social transformation, aim to build a just, peaceful and sustainable world, reflecting the unity of all humanity’. Inspired by a shared intention to create a critical mass to effect the change needed to create a better world, Be the Change is a world-wide movement presented by the Alliance for a New Humanity in Cooperation with Intersections International. It hopes to inspire individuals in local communities to actually participate in co-creating change. Deepak Chopra advises “it is a process that provides guidance, tools and support systems necessary to insure sustainability and success”.

At the start of the evening Deepak spoke passionately and poignantly about the mission of ANH, which sprang forth from an experience he had on Sept 11, 2001. After an 8 hour ordeal thinking that his son had died on one of the planes that had hit the World Trade Center and then finding out that he was not and that he was in fact alive, led him to the realization that we share this with people all over the world. That other people in faraway lands also worry about their children suffering everyday with real problems of death and destruction. More than half the people around the world survive on less than two dollars a day and 40% of all children go to bed hungry every night.

A possible solution that could harness the collective creativity, intelligence, love and compassion to a new level of consciousness, one of non violence started to grow and with that understanding the ANH was born. Their strategy involves 3 steps: 1st Transform yourself, 2nd Make a difference, and 3rd, share the stories of success to inspire and connect.

Deepak then went on the share a story an evolutionary biologist told him about how evolution has always happened through leaps of transitions and that those only occur through times of crisis. And that this time now could be that time. That through our nervous systems consciousness has become conscious of itself. This is called meta-biologic evolution and the potential for something really new to become is possible. Here he gives the example of the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly and how their cluster of imaginal cells feeding on the left behind carcass of the caterpillar to create a whole new organism is analogous to all the places in the world that are clusters connecting the sense of a possibility of a very wonderful moment.

Next in a powerful moment and in his doctor/philosopher/scientist like style he asked us all (a gathering of 1,500 people ) to all breathe in deeply and reminded us that as we did, we werre literally breathing in 10 to the power of 22 atoms and breathing out the same.  Literally sharing a million atoms every time we breathe, we are “members of One breath, One energy field, One emotional field, members or parts of same Consciousness, Love, God. We are contained in One mind, One Body. Feel that in your Heart.”

Next up to speak was the Director of Intersections International who echoed Deepak Chopra’s words of collaboration and transformation. He recounted numerous examples of how being the change in real time, from the story of two Nigerians enemies intent on killing one another in the name of religion who decided to give up the stories they believed about themselves and become brothers, to the expressions of people who donate kidneys and simply view it as another form of hospitality.

In his blog a few days later he wrote:

Deepak spoke first. I joked that whoever put the program together did me an eternal favor because I could now forever say that Deepak Chopra was my opening act! He used the language of science and technology to frame cosmic questions. He talked about how we share a common consciousness and how, scientifically, we all actually breathe and absorb parts of one another. Indeed, as he reminded us, we are one. Wise. Brilliant.  My approach was different—stories, not science—and that we must change both as individuals from the inside out and as a society from the outside in. In so doling, we meet at the “intersection” where we find our deepest humanity and our best hope for a humane society. Though our framing was different, our message was the same and the crowd seemed to “get it.”

After this key note speech we all were lead on an audience participation discussion session and gave us two questions to ponder the neighbor/stranger behind us. The first question was what one thing would I do that would have the greatest impact on change? And the second question asked that once we had the idea what possible outcomes could be created. I turned to look behind me and the saw a women in her late 60s alone and beautifully made up. I pushed past the usual reluctance to meet someone new and as I extended my hand and asked her name she said out loud the same thing I was just thinking!...it was funny in a way because it was the ice breaker that bridged the gap. She was lovely and had a beautiful manner of ease and eloquence about her. And as we discussed together the ‘assignment’ we found out even more how impersonal we all really are ( That’s what I was thinking anyway) Her answers and mine mirrored one another in that we both agreed that to first transform ourselves was going to be the only way to then share a better person out there. That through our example perhaps people would want to be the same.  After the exercise they pointed out that this is what the ANH does to create dialogue around the world to in effect change it.

Next up was the Music and Poetry part of the evening. Led be a moderator named Fred Johnson who works with Intersections International and tours internationally as a musician ‘dedicated to using the arts as a tool for personal wellbeing and global peace,’ we were treated to a spontaneous, collaborative and creative concert/poetry reading performed by Deepak Chopra with violinist Ann Marie Calhoun and pianist Daniel Kelly.

The poems, said Deepak, were just newly translated from the Farsi language, never before heard in English in public. The 6 pieces performed were a spontaneous collaboration between them all, truly inspirational and literally at times brought tears to my eyes. The violin player especially moved me with her innocence, positivity, and style.

That was the end of the evening. I went over to my friends and asked them what they thought. We all agreed that it was an interesting night and that we could see the potential in gatherings like this as well as the cynicism that always threatens to ruin an otherwise potentially inspiring event. And that we all had a choice whether to let that negativity in or not.  That night we chose not…and we were encouraged that we could come together with others who shared our interest in doing something new to change the world and become One with the Evolutionary Positivity of Life.

No Impact Man tells the story of Colin Beavan and his family’s attempt to live for one year without negatively impacting the environment. Starting with a firm conviction that this is a worthwhile pursuit, meaningful to the culture at large, Colin’s vision is both challenged and developed over the course of the year-long experiment.

The film makes parallel points. As much as it illustrates concrete actions toward no-impact, it also demonstrates, sometimes just by virtue of taking place in New York, just how inhospitable dominant American culture is to a “no-impact” lifestyle. As Colin and family cruise on bikes through Times Square, their smiles cannot obliterate the sea of cabs and huge flashing lights that surround them. Though at the end of the film Colin may be changed, the viewer is also forced to reckon with the fact that his changes don’t begin to touch the existing super-structure in which the well-meaning individual toils to evolve.

In one of the best moments of the film, 60’s anti-war activist Mayer Vishner, who shares his vegetable garden with Colin, points out to Colin that his wife Michelle works for Business Week which promotes the American corporate capitalist system (a blatant wrinkle in their family’s new virtue). Vishner says that if Colin thinks his individual efforts are going to do anything to knock out that system, he’s delusional. However, as a film about the individual’s challenge to live in tune with his or her evolving values, No Impact Man provides a whole lot to like, question and ponder.

Anticipating adjustment time, Colin’s experiment works in phases. The first phase is to eliminate all trash, freeze consumption of new products, eliminate carbon-fueled travel, dump the TV and purchase only local (within a 250 mile radius) food. Michelle, a self-described consumer and reality TV junkie, embarks on the journey from a supportive but uncertain perspective. She doesn’t feel Colin’s same inspiration but she loves him and is willing to cooperate more or less with his vision.

Early on, we see her begging Colin to give her permission to get a coffee so she can finish a story for Business Week. Here we see the inevitable situation we all face when we make world-bettering resolutions – the moment they come into conflict with something we want. What’s it gonna be? We don’t find out whether Michele got the coffee that night but later in the film she does state that she’s successfully finished a story without coffee and feels okay in general without it.

Early in the experiment, Colin and his family become the subject of a New York Times feature article with the tongue-in-cheek title “The Year Without Toilet Paper” (yes, eliminating all trash included TP). After the story runs, we see Colin cope with a maelstrom of public attention both in the form of media outlets wanting interviews and reader comments full of vitriol. Michelle tells Colin about coworkers avoiding her and gossiping that what they’re doing is unhygienic.

Undeterred by the criticism, Colin institutes Phase 2 of the experiment—getting rid of all store-bought cleaning products and replacing them with homemade, non-toxic versions (Dr. Bonner’s Castille soap, Borax and baking soda). He fills up their empty bottles with the solution and gets to work cleaning the kitchen.

The last phase— cutting out electricity—is the most dramatic and comes halfway through the yearlong experiment. To mark the occasion, Colin and Michelle throw a party. As the circuit breaker for the apartment is pulled, candles are lit and the guests perform charades in the flickering light. It’s shortly after the shift that we see Colin’s only real moment of doubt in the film when, not unlike a child frustrated at an ill-constructed sand castle that he thought was going to be perfect,  he says “This is stupid.” But the moment of frustration is short-lived and Colin musters the resolve to see the experiment to its conclusion. Eventually, he also gets a solar panel to power his laptop and other essentials.

Here, a question arises. After switching off the fossil-fueled electricity, why didn’t Colin seek out more new technologies powered by renewable energy? It’s possible he nixed that option given the commitment to make no new purchases during the year (though he did buy the solar panel). But, it would have added some excitement and hopefulness to the experiment and demonstrated that the shift to a lesser impact on the environment is not only about privation, but also innovation.

They say a good ending is a new beginning but the movie leaves off uncertain where Colin and family’s journey will lead. Toward the end of the film, we learn that Michelle has had a miscarriage. She talks directly to the camera when she says that the promise of a new baby would have made a perfect ending to the film, but instead, they are left with a lot of “loose ends.”

As the movie wraps up, hopefulness does rise from the sense that Colin himself will continue his work, now within a wider web of community groups, environmental non-profits and educators. We see clips of him giving talks at NYU and on a playground, and another of him speaking with Majora Carter about environmental justice for low-income communities.

When people ask him what’s the number one thing they can do to start making changes in their own lives, Colin tells them to join an environmental community group. I thought this was a great response and probably reflects the best discovery of the year-long journey—that one person alone can’t figure out the best path toward a better way of living, but with the support and shared knowledge of groups, we can make progress together. And as we grow in numbers, maybe even begin to challenge the dominant super-structure of burn, ship, consume and throw away.

Though many criticize Colin and his family for doing what they did from the perch of Manhattan bourgeois comfort, I wonder if the same film from, say, a lower-income, university-employed family living in New Paltz would have gotten as much attention. New Yorkers respond strongly to Colin’s experiment because they identify with Colin and likely his experiment will be most meaningful to those living in New York. In fact, though it displays what an energy-guzzling megalopolis New York is, the film also shows that going no-impact here is probably a lot easier than doing the same in a lot of other urban and suburban places in America. Now, we need a No Impact family in the suburbs of Houston. What does one do without the Green Market and a 35 mile commute to work?

image by gromgull

A funny thing happened the other day in Arches National Park. Rich and I were on our way back from a really fun and challenging hike and had seen dozens of signs along the way asking hikers to stay on the path to preserve the biologically active crust of desert soil. In an enticing alcove full of crevices and minicaves in the stone, I saw a mother and her sons playing off the trail and indignantly said to Rich, “What are they doing? That isn’t the path!” He laughed and said, “Don’t you remember? You went and checked out the exact same place on the way out!”

Indeed I had, and I realized at that point that I am every bit as much of an asshole as everyone I judge and criticize. This judging and criticizing is especially easy to do when traveling, because there are so many people embodying so many unfavorable stereotypes, and I am around them much more than I am at home. From loud obnoxious campers oblivious to others at the campsite to hikers oblivious to the stunning landscapes around them, there are plenty of examples of people who don’t seem to get it, and who bring to life Sartre’s famous statement “Hell is other people.”

But I notice that when I snark and judge, I see much more to snark and judge. And instead of enjoying my magnificent surroundings, I end up wasting valuable mental bandwidth wondering why other people are such dicks.

And then there are the times I catch myself embodying my own unfavorable stereotypes—the impatient New Yorker who huffs when people in front of her are moving too slow, the holier-than-thou “traveler” who looks down on “tourists.” The truth is that, for all my spiritual work and self-congratulations on being so cool, I can be as ugly as the ugliest white-tennis-shoe-wearing, Big-Mac-eating American.

The last few days I’ve been making an effort to notice when I complain or criticize, and I’m really surprised to see how much of this I indulge in. This kind of behavior is truly unkind—I don’t know any of these people I’m judging, or their circumstances. And, seriously, don’t I have better things to think about than what someone was thinking when she got dressed, or why did that family bother coming to the Grand Canyon if they were just going to watch DVDs in their minivan the whole time?

On a deeper level, criticizing others creates the same environment as other forms of cynicism—it functionally separates me from what I’m experiencing and from the people around me. If something happening is truly awful, my reaction should be to do something about it. If I don’t intend to do something about it, then making a snarky comment about it is simply making sport of other people. I do not want to be the kind of person who does this, so as of right now, I’m stopping.

Of course, not all judgement is bad. We do need to be able to distinguish between options, to see clearly and parse our observations. But what I’ve been doing is different. Since being on this roadtrip, it’s like the judgy, criticize-y part of my brain has been on overdrive. I need to shift this, and so I will.

Tim Ferriss posted about a 21-day no complaining experiment on his blog a while back, and I halfheartedly attempted it a few times, usually giving up after a few hours or a few days. It’s harder than it seems like it would be! Many of us use commisseration and complaining to start conversations and bond with each other. But there are better ways, and I’m going to use them more. As always, I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Have you ever conditioned yourself to behave differently? How did it impact the way you see the world? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Just wanted to put up a quick note apologizing for the somewhat sporadic posting over the last few days. Spotty wifi service, camps to be set up and broken down, and National Parks calling to be hiked mean that I’m not getting articles up here every weekday as I’d like to.

That being said, though, I’m working on a corker on realizing that I, too, am as much as an asshole as everyone I like to criticize—especially easy to do when travelling!—and Sarah has seen and reviewed the No Impact Man movie! So you’ll have some good stuff to read a little later in the week.

Thanks for understanding. Off to Vegas where the wifi flows freely!

Rich and I are on a month-long roadtrip across the West, and we spent today at Arches National Park in Utah. We got up early and hiked 4.2 miles through the Devil’s Garden, which the visitors’ guide calls “moderately difficult” but which I’d call “pretty freakin’ hard.”

A year ago, I don’t think I’d have been able to scramble up and down all these crazy rocks like Gollum. But today I could, and I am moderately proud of myself. :) The view was definitely worth it.

I’m learning so much on this trip—seeing jaw-droppingly beautiful new things, meeting inspiring people, and noticing the impact my attitude has on how things go. More on all of it in the coming weeks!

I got my hands on this massive, awesome tome the other day—the result of a decade-long research and analysis effort by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman into how to integrate all the different forms of ecology—and have been slowly working my way through it. This book feels very important so I’m taking my time, making sure to understand each paragraph rather than racing through the way I sometimes do.

I’m catching a lot of gems this way. Here’s one from the introduction, where the authors are laying out their goal for this book: to put together all the various ideas formed by the more than 200 movements within environmentalism to reveal a fuller, multi-layered, and more complete understanding of our home and how best to live in it.

“We do not assert that all perspectives are equal. Some truths are more comprehensive than others. Partial worldviews and partial perspectives reveal partial truths, which are accurate and essential but must be integrated int a larger, more comprehensive picture.”

To me, this underscores the importance of developing new ways to relate to each other—to view our contributions as offerings to the whole rather than viewpoints that must be defended to the death. Looking for agreements is one way to do this. Laying aside our need to be right is another. Having the humility to recognize truths that may be “more comprehensive” than our own piece of the puzzle is yet another.

What are your ideas on making a new culture? How do we put together the pieces to create bold, comprehensive solutions to our problems?

image by Caveman 92223

For 6 weeks a group of us here in Stockbridge, MA had worked to put on an event we called the Berkshire Extreme Green Expo and May 23rd was the big day. We were originally inspired by a vision for our county to be a net-zero energy community. The event consisted of several parts. First was a number of displays. One depicted the history of energy—from the big bang through to elemental energies of the earth, like vulcanoes and geysers, and yes, animals and humans too—to our county being one of the first in the US to have centralized electric power generation (hydro) towards future technological possibilities.

Another display showed examples of national and international pioneering projects: net-zero energy communities, like the city of Masdar that is being built near Abu Dhabi; projects like Teal Farm, which is a trail blazing experimental permaculture farm in Vermont; and passive houses in Europe, which do not need any external energy input.

We also showed short films, both about technological break-throughs as well as deeper philosophical context and background for being activists—Brian Swimme was represented, as was Duane Elgin and Mary Evelyn Tucker.

One of the most unexpected and mind-blowing parts was a children’s drawing project about What might be next? in communication, transport, energy production and housing. The ideas ranged from an animal translator to a flying highrise to a DNA transporter and an air-powered super-plane. Hopefully we will be able to scan them and put them online soon, they were so fantastic – a collection was displayed at MIT the following week, to inspire the inventors there!

As a culmination of the half day event, three of us wrote and performed a play, ‘Primal Energy’ about the human/ interior/ consciousness aspect of the change that needs to happen (as opposed to just changing technology). There was also a panel discussion with the topic ‘Creating a Manifesto for the future”. Apart from two members of our volunteer group, Ross Robertson from EnlightenNext magazine participated as well as Melissa Hoffman, owner of Teal Farm and member of the board of EnlightenNext.

You can watch the panel and the play on youtube: Enter Primal Energy in the search for the play and look up the panel here.

The turnout for the event was not as big as we had hoped, but the responses from those who came gave us a lot of confidence to keep thinking out of the box and share what it is we, as Andrew’s students, are in a prime position to give: The inexhaustible positivity of a worldview, in which human potential is as much part of a new energy discussion as is solar or wind, the larger evolutionary context which many ‘green’ thinkers are not familiar with yet, and the power of collectively going beyond what is known or comfortable.

We are very inspired to go further. On June 11 we have a follow up event to keep defining the Manifesto and to see how we can help to achieve the goal of a net-zero-energy Berkshires. We also want to develop the play, as this way of communication really seems to reach people. I will keep you all posted.

image by Aidan Jones

In 2000, I worked for Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign. I drove a cleaning truck around the state of Florida for a month, wearing a janitor’s outfit and scrubbing floors for TV cameras while accusing both Democratic and Republican politicians of taking dirty money. “Ralph Nader wants to clean corporate cash out of politics!” I’d holler, and raise my mop angrily for the media.

Some days, we also canvassed the streets and handed out flyers. Inevitably I would find myself in an impassioned argument with a Bush or Gore supporter, and I spent hours pleading Nader’s case. Over the several weeks I spent doing this, I worked tirelessly, met a lot of great people, and had a good time. But what I didn’t do is convince anyone to change their minds.

This experience came back to me a few weeks ago, when I went to a friend’s house for a discussion group about Bright Green thinking. We started out slightly contentious and cranky, but then a funny thing happened as we continued to talk and listen to each other. Something actually grew up between us in the room—a shared understanding of Bright Green and some commonality in where each of us might take and use these new ideas. Each of us left energized and with a broader perspective than we had when we walked in.

When was the last time you were able to argue someone into changing his or her mind? Have you ever? Looking back on my 36 years of having and defending very strong opinions on a wide variety of topics, I don’t know that I ever have. And yet, although we each walked into the Bright Green discussion with wildly divergent thoughts about what’s wrong with the environment and how to fix it, we walked out with a shared understanding. We certainly hadn’t become entirely of one mind, but we built a foundation for further conversation and action.

Afterward, I chatted with one of the participants, a young teacher at a middle school in the Bronx. She told me that this discussion group was strange to her, because although we all had and expressed our different ideas, we didn’t fight with each other. Mulling this over, I realized that our facilitator had very consciously created this dynamic of collaborative creation, and how wise she was to do so.

What did she do? First off, she instructed each of us to listen carefully to whoever was speaking, without interrupting or jumping ahead to whatever we wanted to say in response. Secondly, she very consciously listened for and built on ideas expressed by each participant. Put another way, she listened for the highest piece of the truth.that each of us brought with us, and led the conversation by building upon those truths. Instead of looking for things to disagree with, she looked for agreement.

Thinking back, this skill was what was missing from my Nader 2000 experience. If I listened to the people I talked to, it was only to determine what issue they were concerned about so I could trot out the corresponding talking points. I put a lot more effort into putting my arguments together than I did into paying attention and connecting with the people I met. And, of course, it’s not just me. From office politics to 24-hour news programs to political debates at progressive meetings, most of us are far more concerned with making our points than we are with communicating with each other.

When we listen for agreements in our conversations, though, something really astounding happens—we are able to build something together. Instead of separating ourselves by ever finer gradients of opinion, we construct a new way of looking at an issue through each person’s contributions. And in this way, each contributor becomes a partial owner of the newly created, shared, intersubjective point of view.

Of course this doesn’t mean that there are no differences in people’s thinking. Nor does it mean that everyone’s ideas are equally well-thought out and valid. Some contributions do indeed hit closer to the mark than others, and we must make judgements and draw distinctions to the best of our ability. What’s important is doing this in such a way that everyone is brought up to the highest available level of wisdom, rather than brought down to the lowest.

The way we relate to each other defines much of our culture—in it we show how much we value each other, and we set the stage for what we can create together. Making the effort to interact with each other on the basis of agreement shows a great deal of respect for our shared humanity and fosters a sense of possibility. I’m just getting to the point where I can see when someone is doing this and notice the mechanism by which it works. My next goal is to get better at practicing this skill so that I can leave behind my history of polarizing argument and separation, and instead be a part of building a new way culture based on what we share.

This week was all about learning.

• Monday, Victoria wrote about her experiences with giving up perfectionism for the much more fulfilling experience of progress.
• Tuesday, I described what I saw at last weekend’s Evolver Town Fair—lots of energy, tons of potential, and scads of stuff I need to work on.
• Wednesday I wrote about the odd juxtaposition of idealism and realism that was my Tuesday night.
• Thursday, I shared the thoughts sparked by one of my favorite books, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.

This week, I also discovered an amazing site, The Art of Non-Conformity, guide to living unconventionally and worldchangingly (hmm, I just changed the world by inventing a word)! Yesterday he put up a video that captures a lot of my thinking this week.

Like many of us, when I’m confronted with something new, my first tendency is to look at it critically. Where does it differ from my point of view? What’s missing? What’s wrong? But Chris proposes a different approach that strikes me as much healthier and productive: looking at every experience, reading, and conversation as an opportunity to learn something new. “All around us are an abundance of opportunities for learning,” he says, “and that’s what I’m trying to focus on.” Me too, Chris!

Less hating, more creating ...

When I saw that Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars was available as a free Kindle download, I snapped it up (it’s still available, btw). I’d read this book several years back, and it amazed me. Reading it again now, in the context of what we’re trying to do on this website, is an even richer experience. Much of what the Mars pioneers face parallels what we Earthlings are facing right now: how do we handle ecological, political, and economic complexity? What stars do we navigate by?

Set in the near future, Red Mars tells the story of the first hundred colonists’ arrival on Mars, and the first half century or so of history to happen there. As the colonists spend time on the planet, their ideas on where it should go diverge. Some—the Reds, led by Ann—want to treat Mars as a park, studying it with minimal alteration to the landscape. But most others want to terraform the planet to make it more hospitable to life—partially for the scientific challenge of transforming the planet, and partially so that at least some of humanity can escape an increasingly tapped-out Earth. Over the first few years of Martian settlement, the argument grows in ferocity, and it finally comes to a head in an epic showdown between Ann and Sax after dinner one night.

Ann speaks of reverence towards Mars as it is: “Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you’re going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you’re doing, either ... You want to try it out and see—as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it’s bad faith, and it’s not science.”

Twitchy, super-geeky Sax stands up to respond. “The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind. Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning ... The whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can ... If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars’s beauty? ... It adds life, the most beautiful system of all ... There is this about the human mind: if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it. So we might as well start.” At this point, Ann knows she has lost the argument. And with every shuttle bringing more people to Mars, she loses it more completely.

Reading this passage, I was reminded of the difference between Dark Green environmentalism—Ann’s take, which is largely about doing fewer bad things to the environment—and Bright Green environmentalism, analogous to Sax’s view, which holds that human activity and creation can be incredibly beautiful and supportive of natural systems, and that it’s up to us to make it so.

At the same time, there’s a disingenuousness about Sax’s point of view. This statement of larger values and morals is the only one he makes in the entire book—I got the sense that, although he may feel deeply everything he expressed, he also just wants to see if he can do it, to have the experience of solving the greatest puzzle of all time. This is fine, this is great, actually, but transformation of this scale requires conscience and morality at an equal scale, and Sax doesn’t seem to have it.

No, the conscience and the big-picture view come courtesy of genial, idealistic John Boone, the first man ever to set foot on Mars. Throughout his years on Mars, he struggles to create a framework of new values, a new Martian way to live. Through him, we learn about various projects with the potential to lay the tracks for this new creation. The most thrilling to me was the idea of eco-economics, which assigns economic value to activities and products based not on what the market will bear, but on a scientific and values-based analysis of what each contributes to the biosphere. Even as Boone laments the increased political distress on Mars—he witnesses several acts of sabotage and is even framed for murder by security forces—he works to put discover and create this new vision, and to lead Mars into it.

The culmination of Boone’s achievement comes on the top of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, where hundreds of Martians have come together to watch an asteroid burn up in the atmosphere. He gives a speech weaving together all the threads he’s taken up—eco-economics, a new genetic self-repair treatment which greatly extends human life capacity, the idea of engineering a new culture by splicing together all the old ones brought down from Earth. His ideas come very close to those of Integral Theory, which sees all of evolution up to this point as a trove of treasures and pathologies that it is our task to sort through.

Boone’s speech thrills and unites the group on the mountain, and they are all excited to go forth and live it into reality. But several months later, Boone is dead, murdered through the maneuvering of his old frenemy, Frank Chalmers, whose disgust for humanity runs perhaps even more deeply than did Boone’s idealism.

The story continues to unfold from this point with increasing complexity—as more people and more funds flow into Mars, one person’s vision no longer holds sway. Mars breaks into a multiverse every bit as corrupted and full of possibility as Earth before it.

What I love about this book is its combination of idealism and realism. Yes, someday—maybe someday soon—we will be able to go to Mars. But no, going to Mars in and of itself isn’t going to fundamentally change us. The question raised in my mind is how do we create that fundamental change—in ourselves—that will illuminate everything we choose to do, on any planet?

image by rachaelvoorhees

For several months I’ve been noodling over the idea of holding a “Salon of Possibilities” at my house—a chance for people to get together and talk about some bigger-picture stuff that doesn’t often come up in day-to-day conversation. Last night we had the first one; together we read and discussed this interview with Susan Neiman, author of Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists.

This article appealed to me because I’ve been called an idealist in a semi-disparaging way for many years now, as if being idealistic—holding the belief that things can be better than they are now, and that we can make them that way—is a sign of naivete or simple misunderstanding of “the way things work.” But, Neiman says, when people are “realistic,” even if they present their point of view (“humans are violent and greedy and we just need to deal with it”) as common sense, in actuality, underneath that view of humankind is a metaphysical framework that they are imposing on reality. Neiman argues that a truly realistic point of view, being what she calls a “grown-up idealist,” means holding both visions—of the way things are and of the way they ought to be—at the same time, and operating from an understanding of both.

Our conversation was wide-ranging and inspiring to everyone in the room, I think. We discussed Barack Obama, who Neiman mentions in her article as a perfect example of a “grown-up idealist.” We discussed the role of art in idealism, and how the interplay of commerce and consciousness can breed cynicism. Over the two-plus hours we talked, we forged a deeper understanding of ideals and responsibility, and I learned a lot about my friends—things that, even with all the time I’ve spent with them, I didn’t know. It was a powerful night, and I’m looking forward to doing it again.

After everyone left, I opened up Worldchanging and saw a mention of an ABC program called Earth 2100, an evening’s exploration into what human civilization might look like over the rest of the 21st century. Intrigued, I turned the program on about halfway through. When I joined the program, huge storm surge waves were about to hit New York, and the gates people had built to keep them out were failing. Over the course of the next 45 minutes, things steadily got worse and worse—hunger, disease, and poverty took over humanity, and New York was abandoned back to nature.

To be honest, I tuned the program out after a few minutes and went back to surfing my favorite sites to learn about the cool stuff happening right now that may prevent ABC’s catastrophic nightmare from becoming reality. I was disconcerted, not because of the dystopian vision on the show, but by the fact that this is the vision that ABC chose to present. Two hours to talk about the future, and it wasn’t until 1 hour and 48 minutes in that the possibility of the future NOT being a horrible place was even addressed.

We’ve talked before on The Sunny Way about science fiction and how it creates the future. Dystopian visions like this might operate as a wake-up call, but they also might lower people’s expectations and encourage them to ride this civilization business-as-usual style until the wheels fall off, rather than seeing the future as something full of possibilities that we can impact through our actions right now.

On one hand, I’m glad that this question is being raised in mainstream society. But on the other, after seeing it, I felt much as I did after watching The 11th Hour. Why spend so much time on the “OMG we’re all gonna die!!!” and so little on the idea that we are capable of choosing a different destiny? The world is full of incredible people working on amazing projects to transform the way we do everything. It would be great to see them get more exposure.

After such a fun and inspiring conversation amongst friends about holding a vision for the way things ought to be, it was especially jarring to watch a program all about the way things are gonna be if we continue our wicked ways. It was a very real demonstration of the difference between realism and idealism.

What do you think? Do films like Earth 2100 and The 11th Hour perform a useful service in scaring the bejeezus out of people? Could it actually work better to present an inspiring vision of a magnificent future instead?

image by //amy//

Over the weekend, I attended the Town Hall put on by the folks who run Evolver.net, a site dedicated to conscious collaboration to create the future. Colin Beaven spoke, as did folks from the Transition movement and many other various yogis, authors, and scientists. There was an expansive and kinetic feeling of potential in the room—a hundred people in a church talking about possibility, consciousness, and evolution as colored shards of sunlight filtered in through the stained glass windows.

Within all this energy was also a crackling of tension, a feeling that each of us was here not only to connect, but to evaluate. Was this for real? How much do we agree and disagree? And how much of the each others’ worldviews would we find unacceptable?

This tension is natural and good, I think. This was the first event of its kind, and we were all kind of reading each other, seeing how we and our ideas fit in. Allowing for this natural tension, though, I found myself at odds with the sentiments expressed by some of the speakers, which I perceived as anti-modern, angry, and sometimes even smug.

As I listened to speakers decry corporatism, describe Barack Obama as part of the problem rather than the solution, and speak about the coming transformation in 2012, I started to feel tense in my body. I wanted to stand up for all the good brought about by modernity, to interject some rigorous positivity into the proceedings, and—so much—to share a developmental perspective in which we might be able to lay down our anger at The Man and see the path that’s brought us here with equanimity. For how can we consciously forge a future if we are intent upon ripping down so much of our past?

In one discussion group, on Transition Towns, I voiced my thoughts: “It seems Transition is coming from the idea that the demise of industrial society is a done deal, and that all we can do now is retreat and relocalize and regroup. But is this a foregone conclusion? Is there no hope for transforming industrial society—the process that freed slaves and women and brought unprecedented education and health to millions—so that it can bring all those good things to the developing world in a way that contributes positively to the biosphere?”

We weren’t in a configuration that lent itself to deep discussions, so the answer I received to this question was understandably perfunctory: “No one wants industrial society to fail, but business as usual cannot continue.” Obviously. But this statement—and the Transition movement in general—seems to set up an inaccurate, limited choice. Do we really have no options other than business as usual or going gently into the energy descent? Neither strikes me as particularly positive or evolutionary.

Now, don’t misunderstand me—I’m not saying that Transition technologies (like permaculture, systems thinking, and personal transformation) can’t be used in evolutionary ways. It’s all about context. What is our goal? Mere survival? Or is it to keep growing and evolving? Up till this point, human evolution has been marked by an ever-widening circle of care. From caring mostly for ourselves to mostly for our tribes to mostly for our nations, the circle keeps getting wider. Our next step can’t be to make that circle smaller—we must learn to care for the entire world, and for life itself.

As we work in our local communities, we must keep this in mind. It’s not enough to make a resilient community, or even a hundred of them. We must make the entire world resilient. And this means thinking BIG—much bigger than using the air conditioner less, or shopping at the farmers’ market. Thinking big on this kind of scale isn’t going to come out of angry, self-satisfied, us-versus-them attitudes. Nor is it going to come out of feel-good platitudes about new consciousness magically descending on humankind. It’s going to come from each of us laying aside our biases and allegiances to certain ideas—laying aside our egos—and jumping head-first into discussion and experimentation and collaboration.

This is where it gets tricky, because we are all creatures of ego—and postmodern ego at that. Never has each of us been such an island, trapped in an understanding of the universe in which we each have our own reality. This much was evident at the Evolver event, and I could feel it in myself, too—that tension, the urge to convince everyone I was right, to be heard and understood and accepted and to win the argument.

But, as Colin Beaven pointed out in his keynote talk, winning the argument isn’t what’s important. What’s important is expressing our love for life. This means that we must discuss, discover, and implement the biggest, most evolutionary, and most loving ideas. And this is where it gets even trickier, because postmodernism dislikes hierarchy. The idea that anything is inherently more developed than anything else—that one worldview might be more evolutionary than another—is repugnant to us. And so we burn sage and value everyone’s opinion and try to reach consensus, all out of a desire to protect our own ideas and egos. We value our right to our own subjective viewpoints more than we value the collaborative process that will actually get us to workable solutions.

I’m not immune to this tendency—I see how deeply ingrained it is in me and in all the other smart, dedicated postmodern people like the ones at the Evolver Town Hall, who all want to create a new world. I also recognize that changing this—letting go of our little reality bubbles and leaping out of the flatland that postmodernism makes of human culture and ingenuity—is perhaps the most important work that worldchanging people need to do. Even as I hold the stance that the overall trajectory of evolution goes in a positive direction, and that it’s up to us to take on the responsibility for pushing it further, and that caring for all of life marks a higher level of development than caring for one’s own survival, I must listen—deeply—to my brothers and sisters in the creation of the new. And I must both listen and contribute without limitation, for in applying my own limitations, I limit what is possible for all of us.

In the end, me being right doesn’t matter one bit. What matters is that we do the right thing—that we act out of the highest knowledge we have attained, and that we exercise the powers of reason and intuition that evolution has given us to recognize even higher knowledge when we encounter it. In order to do this, I need to step out of my subjective bubble and leap out of flatland—we all do! Because reality is one contiguous, miraculous, constantly evolving system, and being able to understand this means that we—all of us together—are responsible for the whole.

image by christin▲

Recently, I experienced a personal victory. I finished a semester of graduate school completely, and made the previously tight grip of perfectionism on my life a little weaker. While I haven’t found out my grades yet, I am happy, and amazed that I finished this while also working part-time, keeping up with a consistent exercise schedule (that I slightly modified) and writing occasionally for this site.

I know that there’s a lot of you out there that choose to be super busy and super psyched about life, and so this may not seem like such a big deal. But for me it was, in comparison to what I would usually do and the way I usually would respond to the pressure of completing projects within a time frame.

My need to be perfect and make anything I did perfect showed up very strong while I was in college.  It took me so long to complete my papers and I wound up taking several incompletes that took years to finish. In the past, I let laziness, fear, and wanting to make things perfect do me in. I would put off doing my work because I didn’t want to do it right away, and thought I could put it off, thinking I’ll have time later, and it won’t take too long.  But all my projects always did take longer than I planned for partly because I had waited so long to do them.

I found writing term papers to be nearly impossible—I wanted to do a superb job and include every bit of fascinating detail. I thought that details were king. Sometimes I saw the broader links in what I was writing.  What I sought was a feeling of wholeness; I wanted to develop an idea through my own unique style of writing, to develop a thought completely. Coupled with wanting to do a superb job was the critical internal nag putting me down, saying that whatever I was doing was never good enough, or wasn’t quite right. Consequently, I left and went back to school several times, and I took ten years to complete my degree.

What I have learned is that projects take longer with each day you put them off. They use up unnecessary thinking time, and this thinking is repetitive because it’s the same thought “I have to do… I have to do…” I was talking to a high school physics teacher recently about perfectionism.  He said that if you put off expressing an idea because it’s not perfect, then the idea keeps cycling around and round in you and it never changes.  In fact, he said no idea is perfect and will ever be perfect, but when we express them, then they can be worked with. Once expressed, ideas have the freedom to change and we keep developing them for the rest of our lives. This was a misunderstanding I had. I thought I was required to have perfect ideas in order to even express them in the first place. 

It’s interesting that education has changed since I was an undergrad. Now, I usually receive a rubric for each required project in graduate school. In most ways, this has made my own personal writing easier in that I can meet the requirements and then add my own perspective on top. As a teacher it’s showing me what clear instruction looks like: there are specific things to learn, find and do, rather than hey, if I like your work, you’ll get a good grade. 

What is perfectionism? I often look up words I think I already know because it helps me maintain some objectivity. Left to my own mind, I make up some pretty negative and wacky meanings. Most words have multiple meanings which I find adds depth to how they can be used in writing and speech. According to the American Heritage College Dictionary, perfectionism is a propensity for being displeased with anything that is not perfect or does not meet extremely high standards. It also can mean a belief in certain religions that moral or spiritual perfection can and must be achieved before the soul has passed into the afterlife.

Bingo! For me, needing to be perfect shows up exactly like the former meaning. Not only has this meant that I don’t find my own ideas good enough to express, but I’m also critical of others’ ideas too. Not very much can get done in a mental atmosphere as controlling as this. The latter meaning points to humanity’s desire for goodness. We want to achieve a high degree of perfection in so many areas before we die, or at least we want to get to a higher place that where we start out from at birth. I want this too, and agree with this meaning, but I realize that I misunderstood how to get there.

I thought that my ideas had to be perfect from the get go, rather than expressing what is there and through getting them out choosing the best ideas or refining the ones I want to work on. I’m still figuring all this out, so it may sound nebulous. Over these past five months, I often reminded myself of the ideas from two people whose examples “against” perfectionism were particularly vivid to me: my brother and a friend, Campbell Dalglish.

Back in January, while I was doing life coaching homework I spoke to the ten closest people in my life whose perspective I trust and value. During a conversation with my brother, we talked about perfectionism. He said that in his work, there’s really no place for it. He works as an engineer designing cars. The development of each new model is on a time frame. Any new research and design modifications must be worked into the design for a new model within the given time frame. He said that you could have a spectacular idea for a new design, but if it’s after the deadline, it cannot be used because that would mean that the rest of the production schedule for that car would be pushed back and that means loss of money for the company. So for every alteration, no matter how fabulous, there is a cost. This is part of the reason why there are new models each year… Part of it is that car buyers want the latest model for looks, but if the priorities of a car manufacturer are maximum efficiency and safety, then yearly adjustments are good.

When I interviewed Campbell and Catherine at their amazing sustainably built home in Long Island, Campbell thoroughly explained the details of how the house was built.  He said that while the house is going up, sometimes as a homeowner, you want to change planned features, like, “Let’s move the window 6 inches to the right.”  But this means that a construction worker will have to move stuff around. And extra labor means money. So even if you have this fantastic vision of how a window will look set slightly right, is your vision worth the extra money and time? These examples served to concretize the consequences of perfectionism in my life. Every time I put off addressing what needs to be addressed quickly, I lost out on in terms of money, self-confidence, my own integrity and others’ trust.

Now, so many things have shifted for me. I have noticed that whenever I take a step towards a project right away, my thinking about it usually develops. I begin thinking about other things that are related or I get focused and hone in on how I can more clearly develop the idea I want to express. 

Now, my challenge with projects is in determining how much time is required to get something completed, and what level of completion will others and myself be satisfied with, and what projects do I want to take on? Over these past five months, my goal was to finish things, not make them perfect. Being content with getting things done is new for me. I have felt excited and even elated with a few things I’ve finished but for most of the things, accomplishing tasks has meant just crossing things off a list, with no accompanying feeling of satisfaction. After all, my feelings aren’t the most important thing to consider.

When I commit to completing projects I am committing to other people, or to a system, or a structure that is in place.  Their expectations of me and trust in me are important to maintain and uphold.  Learning to be part of a team is a big lesson that I am learning. I wonder how I will learn how to develop confidence expressing my ideas, developing them within a defined time-frame and sharing them with others in public.  This is the next phase of my work on dismantling perfectionism in my life and on adopting a philosophy of ongoing development and acceptance of myself and others.

Happy Friday! This week on The Sunny Way:

• Tuesday I wrote about a powerful realization—that humans and our activities are not separate from nature.
• Wednesday, Victoria wrote about her garden, and seeing how it’s as much about her efforts as the beauty of nature itself.
• Thursday, we let you know about the NY Loves Mountains festival happening this weekend.

Today I’d like to share with you this incredible video of the Milky Way rising in the sky. Amazing to stop and contemplate the wonders swirling all around us, isn’t it? Enjoy and have a great weekend!

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image by Soil-Science.info

How many of us city dwellers ever think about where our power comes from? Or the consequences of our energy consumption? NY Loves Mountains is on a mission to change that, to connect the dots between the people in the Five Boroughs and where the energy we use every day comes from—largely the mountains of Appalachia, and the filthy, outdated process of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining.

The NY Loves Mountains Festival, organized by The Sunny Way’s own Sarah Moon and her partner Stephanie Pistello, is happening this weekend. Here’s a run down of the events—you can read more about them at the NY Loves Mountains site.

• First up is a reading of the play Light Comes, written and directed by Sarah, which loops through history and geography to explore the relationships between energy and culture. I saw an earlier version of this play last year and was really inspired by it. I can’t wait to see where she’s taken it now! The reading will take place Friday night (tomorrow) at 8 pm, at the Philip Coltoff Center, 219 Sullivan Street, with a reception to follow. If you come, please find me and Rich and Victoria and say hi.
• Saturday there will be a Fossil Fools Demonstration and Scavenger Hunt starting at the south end of Union Square. Four stations will ask questions and provide information about why and how we can and must get off of fossil fuels. I also hear there will be bike-powered smoothies available.
• Sunday wraps things up with a concert featuring Ben Sollee, Silas House, and Demolition String Band @ The Bell House, 149 7th St., Gowanus, Brooklyn. Tickets are $17 and available here.

See you there!

image by woodleywonderworks

Summer is coming up—my favorite time of year when gardening takes priority over being indoors. This past spring, I really wanted to start my seeds indoors early, but I was so busy with graduate classes, so I pushed aside seed planting. Gratefully though, I did do a seed germination test with my leftover seeds from years past. Actually, what pushed me to test my old seeds was that I had committed to write about it for this site. It’s interesting how that works, but since I shared my thoughts with other contributors here—Megan, Uli, Sarah, Stella and Rich—I was bound to deliver on it. In the future, I would like to cultivate my interests to a greater extent to where my motivation is large enough to propel me forward, and sharing with others enriches it, reinforces it, but is not dependent upon it.

After the germination tests, I did cull a lot of old seed.  I am really enjoying the clarity and sureness of knowing that all the seeds in my seed storage box are viable. That may sound silly, but it’s a bonus to see the link between effort and results, because in life, it’s not always so clear. For the first time, this spring I looked out at my garden, and realized that its beauty is not only because of the intrinsic beauty that is nature, but also a result of the effort and care of my parents and me. I was moved more by the realization that the garden shows the efforts we have invested in making it beautiful than everything that needs doing.

I am feeling more confident in my abilities as a gardener to flow with the activities that keep it flourishing; planting from seed on time, growing a variety of vegetables, pruning perennials, building the compost, and harvesting the compost. In working on a garden there are a few different kinds of results to witness. There’s the end of season harvest after four or so months after planting, then there’s the slower development of perennials adjusting to their specific locations and also the way the sum total of plants, trees and non-living features blend together, which creates a landscape. 

What I want to say in this article is not so much about the details of gardening and gearing up for planting a multitude of vegetable varieties as it is about the form a garden takes when well tended over the years by human hands.

Yesterday, Megan spoke about our inherent connection to nature and that there is no difference between the force and energy of mountain uplift and the desire, plan and technological know-how of blasting through it to build a tunnel.  I was really fascinated by the connections she brought to light and I can see it so clearly in my garden. Any garden well-tended by gardeners who observe the plants, insects and soil and plan their gardening desires based on the laws of nature will flourish and will be exponentially grander and breathtakingly more beautiful exactly due to human touch, human intelligence. I don’t agree that nature is only at its best the wild forests, untamed and left alone. While pristine land is important for maintaining a certain level of biodiversity I don’t believe that it’s the only natural setting that does our planet good.

So now when I survey my garden, I notice that the beauty is partly a result of my sweat and care and that this care is not separate from the natural rhythm coming from the plants, the earthworms, and from me. This really does change everything!

While I didn’t start my seeds super early, which would have been ideal, as I look around my garden, I see that there are not too many weeds and they will come out easily. There’s a new compost pile to build and a lot of the finished stuff to spread around. Yesterday, I quickly started my seeds for herbs and lettuce, having planned it all out with containers, seed starting mix and a hand drawn diagram. I was amazed at how quickly I got it done and afterwards again noticed that because I prepared all my materials and selected a manageable variety of seeds, starting them was a breeze. I am beginning to choose a natural flow to life, stretching further, but not being a perfectionist about things, getting overwhelmed then crashing. Instead, I am just doing consistently more, taking one step, and then another.

image by Jeff Kubina

Going through a tunnel not too long ago I had an odd, beautiful experience. I realized that the tunnel I was in, the mountain through which it carved, the dynamite that blasted it, and the person who had the idea to go through the mountain instead of around it, were all flowerings of the same thing. Spirit, the universe, nature, God, pick your term—whatever you call it, the same force that pushed those peaks hundreds of feet up into the sky also led to my being there at that moment, in a car going 60 miles an hour through the mountain’s heart.

In that moment, I felt it in my bones—we are not separate from nature. We were created by its workings, and as we express our desire to grow and evolve and create the new, we express nature’s own desire to do the same.

It’s a fashionable notion right now that humans are merely pants-wearing, big-brain-having, problem-causing animals, and all that is true. But we are also much more, because we can see and understand and contribute to this process of flowering and growth in a way that no other animal can. Through these abilities we have become evolution, exploration, and possibility are made flesh.

When we discover the laws of the material universe by learning how matter behaves and how to manipulate it, we are also discovering what the universe wants. Atoms want to have full electron shells, flowers bend toward the sunlight they crave, and humans seek ever more complex, elegant, and moral solutions. At every level these desires show us what the universe itself seeks.

Understanding that we are not separate from the world—that in fact we are its most conscious flowerings—changes everything. We are freed from guilt, and we see that there’s nothing inherently wrong with us. We’re not doomed, flawed, or a cancer on the planet.

And we don’t have to be scared of the future—it is ours to create, by nature’s design! On the deepest level, there’s no difference between what we want and what the universe wants as a whole. We are part of an unending, unfolding process which has given us many gifts precisely so that we can use them. As we bring the fullness of our capacities to bear—imagination, intellect, understanding—we travel further in the direction of what we crave, and so does the process itself.

This week was a juicy one!

• Monday and Tuesday we explored what it means to be Bright Green from the inside out.
• Wednesday, we looked into the Transition movement, and saw both the power and the unanswered questions in it.
• Thursday, we discussed how Transition might fit into Bright Green overall, and how different factions of environmentalism might organize our activities around a common set of values. (More on this next week!)

Today I’d like to share with you a video I saw on Rob Hopkins’s website, Transition Culture. “The Powerdown Show” is a series of ten 20 minute episodes, each going into a different aspect of the Transition movement. This episode is about the origins,  goals, and motivations of Transition. I found it really thought-provoking and also incredibly well-produced. My favorite part starts around 16:00, when different people involved with Transition each say what it means to them. The varied responses are all heartfelt, and the people are each glowing with inspiration—an incredible thing to see!

One more thing: Transition is having a conference this weekend, and as part of it, they will be streaming In Transition, a movie about the Transition movement, online at 1:45pm London time, which means 8:45am Eastern time in the US. You can watch the stream here.

The Powerdown Show - Transition Towns and Energy Descent Pathways from Rob Carr on Vimeo.

If you’re reading in email or RSS and can’t see this video, click here.

What do you think about Transition? Does the idea inspire you? Alarm you? Let us know your thoughts!

image by Neil D.

Continuing from yesterday’s discussion ...

Transition focuses on increasing resilience in communities by creating sustainable, local systems for producing food, generating energy, creating needed products, and transacting business. Life in the “Energy Descent,” as Transition calls it, can be healthier, happier, and more fulfilling than the lives we in the developed world are living now. From the site of founder Rob Hopkins:

“How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march?”

When I first heard about Transition at the 350 Conference, I was with Sarah, who was already very familiar with it. She told me that she’d been contemplating moving to a Transition town, but she felt conflicted. How worthwhile is it, she wondered, to work to make one place resilient, when what needs to change in the world is on a global scale?

Like Sarah, I see a lot of beautiful things in the Transition movement. I like its optimistic, participatory tone, and I like the fact that they see the possibility for an amazing future. I also like that they focus so much on internal transformation, something that seems to be missing from much of the Bright Green stuff I’ve encountered.

Part of me kinda wants to jump in right now—quit my job, move back to Pittsburgh, buy a cheap house, start raising awareness about Peak Oil, and plant a ginormous garden. And I have no doubt that would be an incredibly useful thing to do. Maybe I’d even run for public office.

But, to another part of me, Transition sort of feels like giving up, like going backwards. We and our fellow humans have gone through so much together—beautiful, awful, and everything in between—and we are just starting to get to know each other on a global scale. Wouldn’t it be a shame to go back to focusing on mostly just the people directly around us?

I also wonder if my attraction to Transition comes from the daunting bigness of Bright Green. It feels far-off and cold sometimes, like a sci-fi story more about gadgets than people. And it is difficult to see how we can be a part of it—unless I’m an engineer, or an architect, or a brilliant designer, what do I have to contribute?

Since learning about Transition, I’ve been feeling (and I guess Sarah has been, too) like I need to make a choice between these two movements—one pulling me out to a breadth of context both exhilarating and terrifying; the other pulling me back into the arms of nature. It’s tempting to narrow my focus to one town, one neighborhood, one plot of land that I can make safe and resilient.

But when I make the choice to stand in that super-broad, so-Bright-Green-it’s-blinding context, I see Transition for what it is: one of many technologies that humans need in order to move forward. In this context, Transition isn’t a step back at all—it’s a way to integrally bring forward the traditional values of moral transformation, community, and connection with the land. Maybe Transition’s traditional values can complete Bright Green’s postmodern sensitivity and modernist excitement about having big brains that can think up cool stuff.

This is how I answered Sarah’s question: if she is called to do Transition work, that doesn’t mean she has to do it only for herself and the small community around her. She could do it in the broadest possible context, share all her findings, and encourage others to do the same. She could do Transition in a Bright Green way. So could I.

I imagine what this mashup could look like 20, 30, 50 years out, and I see beautiful, efficient, brilliantly designed Bright Green communities made up of engaged, organized citizens working together to push the boundaries of human possibility—in everything from astronomy to agriculture to spirituality—in every context from local right up to cosmic.

Each city or town will be unique, of course—what works in Detroit may not work the same in Dubai. But each can be embedded in a global communicative culture that continually experiments, shares feedback, and collaborates. Each can contribute to making the whole more than the sum of its parts. Some economies and products may be local, and others may not, but all will be created with full awareness of the facts of nature: nothing ever goes away, and in fact, there is no away. Our planet is one planet, and no part of it is separate from any other. Nor are any of us separate from the whole, or any of its parts.

Right now, it doesn’t seem like the Transition and Bright Green movements have much of a connection with each other. Bright Green sees Transition as Dark Green, going backwards, and Transition sees Bright Green as abstract techno-babble that we don’t have time for. But in truth, they are working on the same thing: finding new ways to live that work within the planetary systems in which we evolved, and which increase human happiness and possibility. Can you imagine what could come out of a collaborative effort?

image by Jeff Kubina

Have you heard about the Transition movement? The New York Times Magazine did a great piece on it a few weeks ago in their Green Issue—here’s their summary of what it’s all about:

“Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.”

The article goes on to say that Transition springs from a quite dystopian vision—Peak Oil and the impossibility of making a full systems switch before it hits the fan—but then takes a Utopian turn, putting new possibilities into the picture. Maybe a low-energy future can be a fantastic place to live! Maybe it’ll be better than what we have now!

The task of the Transition movement is to build bridges to that low-energy future—to create systems of food production, economic activity, transportation, education, and everything else that can run locally and without fossil fuel inputs. How do we do this? The Transition Handbook, written by Transition founder Rob Hopkins, provides 12 steps to help communities work together and figure it out.

The vision of a sustainable local community that can provide all of its own needs is satisfying on a very deep level. It feels like a return to what we were meant to be—people living together embedded in the natural systems around us. But how reasonable is this on a large scale? A few questions:

• How will people in developing countries, who already live largely at the whim of the natural, economic, and political systems around them, respond to the developed world’s request to not come as far as we have?
• Even for those of us who are privileged enough to see and renounce the excesses of our wealthy culture, how can we ever really go back? In this world, time and evolution move in only one direction—forward.
• Also, I wonder—are Transition’s assumptions correct? Surely, we know things have to change, but the Transition movement seems to be betting everything on the belief that we’re already behind the 8 ball, that technology can’t help much, that the systems that support us will inevitably and quickly collapse. If you believe this, then the Transition movement is probably the best use of your time. But I’m not sure that we need to—or can—give up on the larger global framework of our society just yet.

Even with all these questions, I can still see a lot of appeal in the Transition movement. Its language, pragmatism, and idealism make it available to a wider range of people than any form of environmental activism that came before it. Engaging more and more citizens with details of the systems that allow them to live their lives can only be a good thing. And it’s a deeply positive movement, full of possibilities for creativity, well-being, and fulfillment.

What remains to be seen is this: as it transforms small groups in dozens of towns across the developed world, can the Transition movement can keep its eye on the big picture? Can resilient local communities hold the whole world in their hearts?

image by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha

I was thinking about what I wrote yesterday about becoming Bright Green from the inside out, and realized I had more to say! Shocking, right?

First off, it’s not that we have to change ourselves before we change the world. That wouldn’t work very well, would it? It’d be like if the Karate Kid never entered a tournament, just waxed on and waxed off forever. No, training and engagement go on at the same time, each supporting and informing the other. As we open up to a new point of view, we automatically start to engage differently in the world. Meanwhile the experiences we have while engaging with life in new ways cause our ideas and values to shift even more. Internal and external evolve together.

Secondly, reading over yesterday’s post, I was reminded of a point made by the brilliant Daniel Quinn, who wrote the Ishmael books. He says something like, “We can’t base our hopes for the future on human beings suddenly being better than they are right now.”

This is an important idea to remember, but I think it is also not complete. Sure, it’s unrealistic to expect a new consciousness to magically descend upon humanity and make us all into compassionate and environmentally-minded people. But we must also realize that development itself is very real. Human civilization has come a long way. We have a long way still to go, and those of us with the education/resources/leisure/privilege to see further absolutely must push ourselves as much as we can to create new and better ways to live that will benefit everyone.

We also have to recognize that our problems are at least as much about consciousness as engineering. Every great leap in the history of freedom—from the Enlightenment and the American Revolution to the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage—came out of a small group of people expressing a moral conviction that the way things were wasn’t right, envisioning how it ought to be, and leading others toward that possibility. Our movement needs that small group of people, too, with that kind of vision and responsibility and moral clarity. It may as well be you and me.

image by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha

We’ve talked a lot about Bright Green thinking on The Sunny Way, but I don’t know if we’ve ever really defined what it is. Here’s how Worldchanging founder Alex Steffan explains it:

“In its simplest form, bright green environmentalism is a belief that sustainable innovation is the best path to lasting prosperity, and that any vision of sustainability which does not offer prosperity and well-being will not succeed. In short, it’s the belief that for the future to be green, it must also be bright. Bright green environmentalism is a call to use innovation, design, urban revitalization and entrepreneurial zeal to transform the systems that support our lives.”

As I’ve followed and participated in the Bright Green movement, I’ve noticed that it’s very focused on material changes—designing better, building better, living better. Worldchanging and other Bright Green resources do a great job describing what a Bright Green society might look like, but I wonder, what does it mean for a person—with thoughts and emotions and decisions to make—to be Bright Green? How does a Bright Green person see and operate in the world?

Bright Green suggests a people-positive worldview, one in which we see ourselves as flowerings of nature rather than a scourge upon it, with every right to be here. No “Mankind is a virus” stuff allowed.

It also suggests a subtle understanding of our place in nature.  It’s true that we are incredibly powerful; we have altered the Earth more than we could have ever thought possible. But we must also recognize our limits; we can’t just make a new planet out of nothing. As an intelligent race who is already playing with big forces, we are responsible for learning how to work with those forces in a helpful way, but we can’t assume we have the ability to alter the forces of nature themselves. As Stewart Brand put it, “We are as gods, and may as well get good at it.”

This is a big change—most of us think of ourselves as a tiny and insignificant drop in the bucket, or as a doomed and inherently flawed race that will never get its act together. Still others see humanity as God’s chosen ones, and the Earth as our dominion. In some ways, they are right! But we have to be humble and recognize our limitations as we grow into our power. Right now, we’re like a gangly kid going through a growth spurt, flailing around ungracefully. We still have some growing up to do to fulfill Brand’s statement.

So what exactly do we need to develop? Everything: Humility. Integrity. Intellectual rigor. The ability to listen. Flow state. Honesty when dealing with others and when looking at ourselves. Clear thinking. Ego-free communication. Transcendence of gender conditioning. Physical and emotional strength. Skills for living with fewer fossil fuels. Willingness to experiment and fail and succeed. The ability to not take everything personally. Understanding our continuity with each other, the Earth, and the entire universe. Caring more about the big picture than we do the thoughts and desires of our local little selves.

All of this development is necessary, because we need to be strong and smart and clear-headed and responsible to complete our task—creating both a new worldview and a new world. And of course, we’re not in training: we both prepare and act as we go. The path and the goal are the same.

Of course, changing the way we look at the world and pushing ourselves to grow are a lot more difficult than writing a check to the Sierra Club or stepping up our efforts to recycle. But the Bright Green future we want means an enormous shift of material reality, and in order to make it happen, we have to make a correspondingly enormous shift inside, to get our minds and hearts around the Bright Green worldview.  If we want a clean, just, intelligent future, then we need to become clean, just, intelligent people. We must become Bright Green from the inside out.

This week on The Sunny Way we looked into our core concept—how changing ourselves is a vital component of changing the world—from a variety of perspectives:

• Monday, I wrote about my experiments with optimum nutrition and exercise and how the walls of what-I-thought-I-knew are crumbling.
• Tuesday, Esther updated us on the project she’s involved with to build bridges between Israeil and Palestinian women—powerful stuff!
• Wednesday, I described how my brain exploded, in a good way, from reading Naomi Wolf’s Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
• Thursday, I wrote about and signed up for the Truth Squad’s its mission to get radical climate awareness on the agenda in newspapers, magazines, and blogs around the country. We also launched our email subscription feature!
• Today, one of my favorite blogs, Tiny Choices, ran a survey I filled out!

Today’s post is all about the Waxman-Markey Bill currently swirling around Capitol Hill. It will create a cap-and-trade system aimed at dramatically reducing carbon emissions over the next few decades. What is cap-and-trade? Good question, and Hank Green from Eco-Geek (a remarkably level-headed green technology blog) has created this short video to answer it.

Once you’ve got the basics from this video, check out some of the more in-depth links here. And contact your Congressperson to let them know that you want a strong bill that doesn’t have loopholes or giveaways for big energy. We need real change, not just another law that armies of lawyers can find a way to weasel out of!

This is an incredibly exciting time. By this time next year, we could have a fully functioning carbon economy, with incentives to go cleaner and costs for continuing to pollute. Too awesome.

OK, now I’m totally eco-geeking out, so I’ll sign off. Have a great weekend!

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image by SimonDoggett

Since reading Naomi Wolf’s most awesome book Give Me Liberty and attending the 350 Conference Saturday before last, I’ve been feeling the urge to get even more deeply involved with the climate change movement and researching different ways to do that. (More on some of the cool stuff I’ve found next week.)

Looking at my strengths and at what needs to be done, I’m pulled toward finding more opportunities and outlets to share ideas and inspiration via writing. Spirited exchange of ideas is a huge component of democracy, and Wolf spends several chapters of Give Me Liberty on the importance of debate in creating a well-informed and participatory citizenry. She suggests that we write Op-Ed pieces, Letters to the Editor, and blog posts to get the message out, and even explains how to go about it.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Antoine de St. Exupéry’s The Little Prince, “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.” Communicating is what I do best; maybe I can help create a yearning for a clean and meaningful future.

All this on my mind, I saw a call for participation in the Truth Squad on It’s Getting Hot In Here (one of the best climate change activism blogs on the web), and I signed up right away. Here’s an excerpt from the call for volunteers:

We need YOU to join the Truth Squad and encourage other people - especially news geeks and people who like to write to help us get some TRUTH into this debate, locally and nationally.

It really is that simple. Winning a better, cleaner future is about winning hearts and minds and telling a winning story. We are particularly positioned to do this well and powerfully. It’s time to make some noise!

I’m excited to participate in this as a member of a group who can help with ideas, feedback, and support. If you’d like to be a part of this as well, click here and sign up by tomorrow, May 15th, 2009. Happy agitating!

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.

The book begins with an exploration of the question “What is America?” She argues that it is not a place, but a state of mind. “The consciousness of freedom—the psychology of freedom that is “America”—is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry ... Liberty is a state of mind before it is anything else. You can have a nation of wealth and power, but without this state of mind—this psychological “America”—you are living in a deadening consciousness; with this state of mind, you can be in a darkened cell waiting for your torturer to arrive and yet inhabit a chainless space as wide as the sky.”

In her recent travels across the geographical country of America, she came to see that most of its inhabitants no longer experience this limitless sense of possibility. In order to discover why, and for guidance on how we can reassume this state of mind, she returned to the writings of our Founding Fathers. Here are some of her reflections on the Declaration of Independence:

“The Declaration is not saying: “Hurrah, you are born free, enjoy your bingo or your yoga as you see fit.” ... Rather, it is saying something darker and more personally demanding: you have a sacred obligation to take the most serious possible steps and undergo the most serious kinds of personal risks in defense of this freedom that is your natural right; and you must rise up against those who seek to subdue you—wherever and whenever they appear ... Jefferson left us not a guarantee of a life basking in a lawn chair, but rather a guarantee of a life of personal upheaval and sacrifice when necessary.”

I am not exaggerating when I say that Wolf’s interpretation blew my mind. Like most of us who’ve grown up in the US, I’ve read the Declaration dozens of times, but I never got that “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was not so much about me, but about this idea of freedom, of human worth, of liberty, that our country was built on.

Of course, there are those who choose to focus on the Founding Fathers’ inconsistencies—many of them owned slaves, and women were left completely out of the bargain. But those historical realities don’t discount the radical nature of the ideal they put before us and the challenge implicit in that ideal, to which they ask all Americans to rise—the aspiration and struggle toward ever-more-perfect expressions of liberty.

There’s much much more I could say about this book. As I read about Wolf’s ultimately unsuccessful attempts to talk to someone in Mayor Bloomberg’s office contrasted with the friendly reception she received at the Army recruitment headquarters, I laughed. As I read story after story of heroic and oppressed individuals taking on and fighting for this “American” state of mind, I cried openly on the subway, more than once.

Mostly, though, reading about how our rights have been chipped away bit by bit, I got fired up and motivated to act. Why should it be so difficult to conduct a protest when our right to do so is right there in the First Amendment? And how are protests supposed to do any good when they are contained in fenced-off “protest” areas, when dissent is managed by the powers that be? Why are voter eligibility rules and processes so arcane and opaque? How democratic is it to have to jump through a thousand hoops in order to run for public office?

It’s true that no one of us can do everything, and there’s a lot to do. Reading this amazing book has inspired me to step up my real-world actions in support of the causes I believe in. More on that tomorrow.

This is a guest post by Esther Kassovicz, updating us on the progress of her project to build bridges between Israeli and Palestinian women, which she first told us about a few months ago in an 11 Questions survey. Fill out the survey and let us know what you are up to! We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

We’ve had by now 2 monthly joint meetings, and I feel that the trust between us is building slowly but surely. Our facilitators are very experienced and our various activities have enabled us to discover and rediscover again that each of us, in spite of surrounding opposition and cynicism about the future of such gatherings, want to give this a real chance.

The first time we all met in March, we were given a sheet with 5 circles, and were asked to specify our various identities and which one is the most important to us. Quite a few women wrote they were human beings and women first, and only after that Israeli or Palestinian or other things. It was very powerful thing to do and realize we really had a common ground to stand on, from where we can look together at everything else in our way. And as we went around we found everyone was there to further deepen our knowledge of each other and each other ’s cultures which was very moving and the potential of our group. At the end, we all sat mixed up in our groups, and each of us had to light a match and say in those few seconds what she wishes to happen in this group, and it turned out we all shared a lot of hope and positivity about what such a group of women can achieve.

Second time we met in April, we had a 2 days weekend gathering in a lovely guest house located in Beit Jalla, a village outside of Jerusalem, named Talitha Kumi where the women from the West Bank could avoid going through Jerusalem and the hassle of getting all the permits to cross the checkpoints in order to attend.  Sadly, they could only stay for the first day, and the Palestinian women from the North of Israel could only arrive late in the afternoon, so we only had all three groups together mainly only for the last activity that day.

So the Israelis and the women from the West Bank had time for at least a couple of activities, one of which was looking at the story of Little Red Riding Hood with a twist, from the wolf’s point of view. This helped us consider how much stereotypes and prejudice prevent us from knowing each other for real and from finding ways for coexistence. To me, the most moving part of this discussion, was to recognize there was already enough trust and sensitivity between us that enabled us to look at this phenomenon together, and see we all shared this and even though we didn’t have an answer yet how to overcome this, we didn’t recoil or get discouraged—just felt that by coming together as we were, we were giving a chance exactly for something different to occur between us.

When the women from the North arrived, we watched a documentary named Two State of Mind by acclaimed director Shira Richter, about two actresses, one Israeli and the other Palestinian who battle it out in the heat of the Sahara desert in a 4x4 Jeep rally—a story of extraordinary friendship despite their strongly held differences in their faiths and versions of history. It brought up a lot and we had a lively discussion. The main sense I got was that although many appreciated the value of their friendship as it came across in the movie, people felt it wasn’t satisfying enough and hoped to go even further in our group, even though we’re not yet sure what that means and whether that’s even possible, especially that some women have previous experience of such mixed groups and not so much happened as a result.

After the West Bank Palestinian women left and after dinner, we didn’t have anything planned but we continued hanging out together. A couple of the younger Palestinian women brought a music CD with wedding music, as it’s apparently the wedding season in their village, and they’re practicing their dances. So they happily played it for everyone, which was great fun but a bit humiliating for some of us Israelis because we had to admit as simple as it might look, belly dancing is an art and we don’t quite know how to move that part of our body…those of us who have already known this, just watched some of us finding this out that evening—it was fun for all nonetheless…

Then quite spontaneously someone suggested we played Truth or Dare and very soon we were sharing some savory interesting stories about ourselves. It’s quite priceless what spending such unplanned time together enables, and we hope we can have more opportunities for such time with the West Bank women as well.

The next day was very full too, but I’d like to tell particularly about a couple of the activities because they were very revealing and interesting. In the first one we were divided in two equal groups, each given 15 balloons, and asked to come up with a strategy to gain as many balloons for our group, and only fully blown balloons counted. Our interpreter was the observer. It was quite exciting that both groups came up with the same two strategies—first was the win:win no battle offer, basically not to risk losing any balloons in fighting, but rather join forces and we all have 30 balloons together. The second offer, in case the other group wouldn’t agree to this brilliant idea, was to fight to get them from the other group.

We were very pleased that the win:win no battle offer was accepted immediately, but the facilitator kept changing the ground rules, so we needed to keep negotiating over those. The revealing part was what the observer told us which was that the Palestinian women let the Israelis dominate the negotiations and also particularly in one group, although they actually wanted to fight first, they recognized the Israeli woman who took the lead had a good suggestion, so they felt they shouldn’t voice their reservation with the leader. So this dynamic was very interesting for all of us to look at—both for the Israelis to question how are they dominating, and for the Palestinian to question why they feel silenced—and see the effects of this dynamic if we’re not aware of it. I felt very raw looking at all this and excited because I see such potential in changing these limiting patterns when we’re truly becoming aware of them. If we can do this, this is a real change in consciousness .

At the last activity of the weekend we were each asked to dedicate ourselves a flower for we are or for something great we did. What was striking to me was to see how naturally the Palestinian women were able to speak about themselves and their achievements, and how the Israeli women felt much more difficulty and discomfort with doing this. I almost didn’t do this, as I was blanking out, and even when I finally spoke I didn’t make much sense. :) The most moving part was that one of the Israeli women couldn’t do it at all, and a Palestinian woman actually took another flower and dedicated it to her.

There’s something very beautiful developing between us and we’ve decided to start initiating more communication between our monthly joint meetings to simply keep moving along together. I’ll keep posting as we go along.

image by moria

At the beginning of the year, I made a commitment to improve my physical well-being and strength through nutrition and exercise.

My goals were simple: I wanted to see how it felt to take excellent care of my body, and I wanted to find out what can emerge from going beyond what I thought I could do. How would eating super-nutritiously and pushing myself with exercise transform me? And can doing something I’ve never done before in one area of life bring about new possibilities in others?

Four and a half months in, I’m learning a ton through these changes.

Nutrition

I started with Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s Eat to Live program on January 5th, and, though I have gone off the plan here and there since then, for the most part, this plan has become my standard diet.

He recommends eating a pound of raw green veggies every day, plus a pound of cooked veggies, at least a cup of beans, 4 or more fruits, and a handful of nuts. That’s a lot of veggies to get in me, and most days I don’t make the goal, but I eat a LOT of greens—mostly in the form of green smoothies and salads.

Like I said, I’ve had some deviations. On Easter, I really enjoyed the bunny cake and the mashed potatoes. And several times I’ve strung 4 or 5 days together only to slide right out of the zone again.

But I haven’t gone mad for food, and it’s not hard to get back on track. This in and of itself constitutes a huge shift in my habits around food. In the past, I figured if I ate some French fries, I already ruined everything so I might as well also eat the cupcakes, the chips, and the brie baguette. Now, though, I make a point to focus on and really enjoy whatever I’ve decided to have. Then the next meal I shift back into greens-mode.

I see this same dynamic in meditation—when I catch my mind wandering, there’s no need to make a big production out of what a bad meditator I am and how I have no discipline and I can never stick to anything, blah blah blah. I can simply just bring my awareness back. It seems that in many areas of life, I am learning how to see what needs to be done and then do it without drama. This is huge!

When I’m eating a lot of greens and fruit, I feel freer to make decisions rather than be pushed along by inertia. I feel lighter inside, less obsessed with food and more interested in the rest of life. I also see that my strength and endurance go way up the more cleanly I eat, and I crave more and more physical activity. My behind has grown roots in the sofa for many many years, so this is also pretty huge.

Exercise

At the beginning of the year, I was still recovering from a broken ankle and under doctor’s orders to take it easy with the exercise. On January 18th he gave me a clean bill of health to start working out again, so I started walking a lot. Gradually I added in sessions on the elliptical trainer at the gym.

In February, I joined Uli’s challenge to commit to an exercise goal and meet it every week, or else pay the group $50. I am happy to say that I have met my goal of 5 hours of exercise every single week! Some weeks that has meant dragging myself to the gym when I would rather be doing anything else, but that’s the point, right?

In March, I had a session with a wonderful former-bodybuilder-turned-personal-trainer who developed a weight training program for me and for the last 6 or 7 weeks I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it. I love being able to see measurable progress, both in the number on the weights I’m lifting and in the reduction in flab around my body. I also like the meditative focus and determination that weightlifting requires of me. For 3 sets of 10 reps, I make my commitment and follow through on it. It feels good.

Physically, I’m getting into better and better shape. My resting heart rate has gone down 25% and recovers very quickly when I stop exercising. I’ve lost 28 pounds, dropped 9 inches off my waist, and am out of the BMI’s “obese” range and into just plain “overweight” (which I find really funny for some reason).

But I would say that the greatest gain has been the internal shift from seeing my body as something negative I couldn’t figure out and would just have to accept, to recognizing and appreciating the incredibly sensitive and powerful instrument it is—that I am. I spent a very long time feeling victimized by the mystery of my body, but now I am interested in exploring it. How far can it go, this vehicle of mine? What can I use these hands and lungs and brains to create? What can I experience? How can I contribute?

In the last few weeks, I’ve taken my first few tentative steps into running, and am rather shocked to find that I like how difficult it is. I want to push myself, to go farther than I thought I could, and I find this feeling leaking over into all of my life. It’s incredible, really, and exactly what I hoped would happen.

Have you made a shift in how you take care of yourself? What has it created in your life?

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.

Happy weekend!

This is the second part of my recap of the 350 Conference at Columbia on Saturday, May 2nd. Read Part 1.

The afternoon of the 350 conference started out with a panel presentation on Climate Law, Policy, and Economics. First up was Michael Gerrard, an environmental lawyer and director of the Center for Climate Law at Columbia. His speech centered on legislative and regulatory responses to climate change. His view differed from Dr. Hansen’s in that he thinks that neither a carbon tax nor a cap and trade scheme are enough—both can be easily made porous, and both leave out large segments of the economy.

He supports massive regulation to close the holes that will inevitably open up in carbon taxing or cap and trade: technology standards, efficiency standards for appliances and other machinery, utility regulation, road use pricing, a floor price for gasoline, land use regulations to end sprawl, agricultural regulation to end soil-degrading practices, and, most controversially, regulation on advertising that encourages high levels of consumption. We have limits on advertising for harmful things like cigarettes and liquor, he said, so why not put limitations on ads for big cars, cheap imported stuff, and other environmentally harmful products? He showed this famous image and suggested that the U.S. Government put together a program to promote thrift and efficiency.

As he rolled through slide after slide of proposed regulation, I kept thinking, “Dang! That’s a lot of regulation!” I understand that much of it is necessary, and focused more on the supply side—manufacturers and designers—but it still got my red-blooded American hackles up a bit. I was reminded of last fall when I was in San Francisco and saw that I was mandated by law to give my seat to the elderly or disabled. Do we really need laws like this to get us to do the right thing? Maybe we do…

I liked his ideas about promoting thrift and efficiency better. These are core American values that we have gotten away from—been pushed away from, in fact, by other forms of advertising that create false needs that would have us consume until there’s nothing left. Seems only fair that, in the marketplace of ideas, values of frugality and making the most of what we have should get some time, too. This may also be a good way to bring people with different, more conservative values into the discussion.

Next up was Dr. Gernot Wagner, an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, who spoke about the huge costs of making the transition to a low carbon world, and how to finance them. He shared the idea of Clean Investment Budgets, in which developing countries would sell some of their carbon allowances to developed countries with the requirement that they use the proceeds to invest in reforestation and clean technologies.

After Dr. Wagner, we heard from Kevin Conrad, the Special Envoy and Ambassador for Environment and Climate Change for Papua New Guinea. He began by explaining that people in developing countries who cut down their forests aren’t acting out of some deep-seated hatred for the environment, or even out of a lack of interest in climate change. They do what they do because they have hopes and dreams for their own children, and, in the current economic paradigm, their forests are worth more cut than growing.

He suggested a shift in attitude—instead of looking at these people as impoverished, we should see them as rich, because they are in control of perhaps the most precious resource we have in the fight against climate change. He also made the point that, although efficiency and carbon markets can get us part of the way to the CO2 reductions we need, there’s still a huge gap between the reductions they can provide, and the targets we need to reach. The only thing that can bridge that gap, he says, is protection and renewal of the Earth’s great forests. We literally can’t get to 350 without them.

There’s also the fact that it takes time to develop and roll out the new technologies we need to reduce emissions in the developed world. But “not cutting down trees” is a technology that everyone can understand and can be implemented today. Our task is to make it economically feasible for the people who live in these forests to support themselves and grow their communities without cutting them down. This involves partnership and trust between developed and developing countries.

Conrad was an eloquent and passionate speaker. Through him, it was easy to see the possibility of a new way for countries to work together on a global scale to change the way we do things.

Next up was educator Jaimie Cloud, founder of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education in New York. She told us about a fishing game her organization has developed, in which participants must learn to work together in order to avoid crashing the system. Having seen many groups of children and adults play this game, she’s been able to identify the main mental models under which we operate in an unsustainable way:

• Iceberg model: In which we react to symptoms rather than root causes.
• Scarcity model: We hoard or become martyrs and neither works
• Bummer model: This can’t be done.
• Social trap: Do what everyone else is doing.
• Zero sum game: There can be only one winner and in order for me to win, you have to lose
• Classic economic model: Resources are unlimited and everything can be substituted.
• Masters of the universe model: We are in control and can fix it.
• Unawareness: We simply don’t think at all.

She then pointed out how, even though we might not be certain of our mental models, that doesn’t prevent us from using them, resulting in the crash of the fishing game over and over when she runs it with adults. In contrast, the children she works with seem to have much more facility with seeing through these faulty mental models, and usually stop crashing the game after the first go. They easily get the point that if they work together and don’t take more than their share, the game works out better for everyone.

As someone who’s very interested in what internal changes will be needed to create change in the external world, I was fascinated by Cloud’s talk. We need to create new mental models, she said, based on recognizing and appreciating limits, seeing systems as wholes rather than parts, and understanding that life is not a zero sum game, but one in which the “mathematics of the golden rule” mean that working together works better.

Dr. Johannes Lehmann, co-founder and Chair of the Board of the International Biochar Initiative, was up next. He explained what biochar is—pyrolized plant matter that is then turned back into the Earth, sequestering carbon and enriching soil—and described how it can be used to turn waste plant matter into a valuable carbon sink.

At the beginning of the conference, we’d each received a flyer from biofuelwatch.org.uk warning against biochar and the International Biochar Initiative specifically, saying that the IBI was seeking funding for massive tree plantations to be burned and converted into biochar. Perhaps Dr. Lehmann had seen this flyer, because he was careful to lay out some caveats on biochar: it is not a silver bullet, but one of many possible strategies; and it doesn’t make sense on a massive scale, because any gains you get from using it would be eaten up by transporting the plant matter to the pyrolizing facility.

One of the anti-biochar activists was on hand to question Lehmann, and said that he seemed to have changed his message a great deal in recent weeks, but she also seemed to believe that the large-scale intentions of the IBI remain unchanged.

Whether Dr. Lehmann was telling the entire truth about IBI’s aims remains to be seen, but his proposals seemed much more reasonable and modest than what was claimed on the anti-biochar flyer. Yes, planting hundreds of hectares of trees just to burn them down sounds pretty crazy. But if biochar-creating facilities can be created on a small scale and put in places that have organic mass to dispose of anyway, and if it works to sequester some of the carbon, then why not do it? At least, we should allow science to determine if it’s worth it or not.

The final speaker of the day was Richard Heinberg, Peak Oil scholar and author of Peak Everything and the upcoming book Blackout about Peak Coal. He showed data on coal production in the U.S. and in other markets around the world, concluding that Peak Coal will happen between 2025 and 2030. However, this simple lack of supply will not be enough to get us to the emissions reductions we need—we need to consciously phase out the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, and soon.

Beyond this, he says that it will not be possible to replace our current energy usage with alternative sources in time, and instead we must look into reducing our energy needs through efficiency and through lifestyle changes. History shows a direct correlation between fossil fuel usage and economic growth, so we will have to look to new economic models not predicated on material growth but based instead on health, education, and cultural expression.

Heinberg closed by pointing us to the idea of Transition Towns, highlighted recently in the New York Times Magazine, where citizens come together to strengthen their local economies and learn vital skills for living with less energy.

The point that Heinberg made, about looking elsewhere for our ideas of “the good life,” struck me as a particularly strong one. Since overconsumption doesn’t make humans happy anyway, while health and education and actualization do, it only makes sense, at least in the already-developed world.

Overall, this conference provided a comprehensive view of the science of climate change and a glimpse into some of the possibilities for handling it.

image by Sugar Sweet Sunshine

Last Saturday, I attended the 350 Conference at Columbia University with Sarah and Rich. Organized by students in the Masters Program in Climate and Society, the speakers looked into climate change from many different angles. Most were scientists, focused on the facts.

NASA’s James Hansen—the outspoken climate change researcher who the Bush administration famously tried to silence—started off the day with an overview of the data that led him to the conclusion that we need to keep CO2 levels at or below 350 parts per million in order to preserve the climate in which we evolved. This is a far lower goal than many suggested levels, but Hansen’s research shows that around 450 ppm, ice melts and cannot refreeze, leading to a sharp rise in sea level and massive catastrophe around the world. He argues for a simple carbon tax—about $1 a gallon, with all the proceeds to be rebated to the American people—to change behaviors and get us off fossil fuels.

Dr. Hansen’s data was convincing, but his presentation (PDF) really made me want to fire up my laptop and edit. I was reminded of the famous case study in Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations where engineers warned of problems with the Space Shuttle Challenger’s o-rings. Looking through the graphs and tables they presented to make their case, it’s easy to see why the launch was not delayed—the data didn’t tell the story the engineers needed to tell. Likewise, Dr. Hansen’s graphs showed ups and downs without much context as to what makes the curves alarming—except for the one that showed CO2 levels in the atmosphere literally going off the charts.

This theme came back in the next presentation, given by Dr. Daniel Hillel, on the effects of human activity on soil and the relationship between soil and climate change. His topic was fascinating and he offered many positive possibilities to increase the organic content of the Earth’s soils, and thereby increase the amount of carbon stored in them: no-till agriculture, reforestation, usage of cover crops. However, he warned that even with massive changes, gains can easily be lost if we revert to older cultivation methods that strip the soil.

Dr. Hillel was clearly passionate about his subject, and offered one of the best quotes of the day—“I’m an optimist because I don’t know what to do with pessimism.” But he had the same problems with his presentation that Dr. Hansen had, and he actually read big chunks of text—whole pages worth—from his slides.

It might seem like I am harping on this point about the bad presentations. If I am, it is only because it is so desperately important! These scientists have the inside scoop on reality, but if they can’t tell the story in ways that other people can connect with, then how do we build a movement? Maybe truth shouldn’t have to be “marketed,” but I’m afraid that, in this world, at this time, it does. These scientists clearly need some help with this part of their work.

Next up was the speaker I was looking forward to hearing the most—Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx and tireless proponent of greening the ghetto. Carter framed the climate change discussion in human terms, giving examples of how our current dirty energy economy has been subsidized by the physical, mental, and economic health of the poor. We have sold the human rights of poor people around the world, she said, for more and more cheap stuff. And then she exhorted us in the audience to use whatever privilege we have to help turn that around.

One of her ideas to improve the situation centers on horticultural infrastructure in cities—building plants into urban plans from the very beginning—to beautify spaces, clean air, capture carbon, and regulate water flow. This kind of work is as restorative to troubled people as it is to the environment, she said, and it should be part of a comprehensive green jobs program.

She also suggested that when we build a national power grid, we do it in such a way that power is decentralized, so that people in areas with lots of sunshine can sell that power to the grid and it can be delivered where it’s needed.

When she spoke about the decentralization of electrical power, I couldn’t help but think of what a new green economy built by and for all people could do for the decentralization of political and economic power in this country and around the world. With plans like the ones Carter is working on, maybe more of us will connect with the freedom and responsibility we have as citizens of developed and democratic societies. Because, as Carter said at the end of her talk, empowered people who have a stake in the world change the world. So, in building a bright green future, much of our work must be in empowering people, as many as we can, to participate.

I’ll continue with the second half of the day in tomorrow’s post.

image by The Sly Gentleman

There are lots of great tips on the web and in books about things you can do to save money and reduce your impact on the environment, but today, sitting around in the lovely May sunshine I’ve been thinking about the wonderful side effects of laziness.

There are so many worthwhile things I could do today other than sit around in my pajamas reading a book I borrowed from a friend, napping and working on my writing, things that on other days hold real appeal to me, but not today.

I could go to the Green Living Expo at the State Fair grounds and find out all kinds of new and interesting information about green technology, local foods and environmental initiatives happening in my area.

I could be responsible and do my laundry, which is beginning to pile up after a week of mud-pies, baked goods and bonfires.

I could take my kids to The Festival of Nations and expose them to all kinds of interesting cultures and foods, expanding their horizons and having good quality family time in the process.

I could go to the garden center and get started on my garden for the year. The forecast is frost-free for the foreseeable future and it would be the perfect day to garden.

I could go to lunch with a friend and catch a movie.

But all of that would require me to change into my real clothes, leave my sunny lounge chair on the deck and participate in life and today doesn’t feel like the day I will save the world.

Still, I am doing some good by doing nothing. I will use no fossil fuels in my travels today from the lounge chair on the deck to the kitchen to refill my water glass, or to the restroom, or to my bed. I will forgo the comforts of modern electronics in favor of solar heating and lighting obtained the old-fashioned way, by sitting in the sun. I will save money by eating stuff I already have on hand. I will even reduce my need for water and laundry detergent by not bothering to mess up yet another outfit.

Sure, it doesn’t seem like much, but over the course of the summer lazy days like this add up. I’m not saying I’m bowing out of society completely. I’m just saying that days like today are good for balance, good for the soul and, in a small way, good for both the budget and the planet.

image by √oхέƒx™

A few months ago I started to observe the moon every night as part of an assignment for a science education class. The instructions were to watch the moon daily, at the same time, from the same location for about 5 weeks and record all observations in a journal. This seemed straightforward enough, fine, let’s see how it goes. I decided to set my cell phone alarm to 11:30 p.m., because I knew I would forget.

At first, it was hard to pull myself away from my computer or get home a little earlier just to observe the moon. I wanted to stay inside, writing emails or reading. It was too cold—why bother watching it? I can just look up the phase online, I thought.

I could look up every last bit of minutiae about the moon online, but it’s no substitute for the actual act of going outside and watching. I did not know this back in February. So, I recorded data on the phase, elevation from horizon, size, color, shape, visibility, weather, and star visibility. I found my exact location in latitude and longitude. Did you know that people in the southern hemisphere see the phases of the moon in the opposite order that we northerners do? They see it waxing from the left and waning on the right, whereas we see the moon grow and shrink just the opposite way. This is all new information to me, a person with virtually no science background embarking on a new career to be a science teacher, humbled by how much there is to learn and surprised that I’ve been walking this planet for 35 years and didn’t know these things.

La Luna, the moon, is our closest neighbor in space.  It is a mere 240,000 miles away. The sun in comparison is 93 million miles away. The moon rises in our east and sets in our west just as the sun does. This is because, like almost all planets in our solar system (except for Venus and Uranus), they rotate around the sun counterclockwise. The moon’s distance from us varies during the month because its orbit is elliptical. Apogee is the name given when the moon is its furthest away from earth, and perigee is the name of the moon’s location when it is closest to us, actually 7% closer than its average distance. The dark spots that we see on the moon are large plains called flatlands. They are also termed lunar maria, because early astronomers thought they were bodies of water—mare in Latin, plural, maria.  These plains are the result of ancient volcanic eruptions that occurred between three and three and a half billion years ago. 

After the five weeks, I compiled my data. I was missing most of the drawings, and forgot to find out the weather or didn’t record the elevation or missed a few days in a row. I thought I was on top of all this, what happened? My generous professor allows us to redo our assignments over to achieve mastery, as a model for us to keep with our own students. Ideally, this policy fosters development and responsibility. Ok, so this time, I carefully recorded everything in a notebook and used binoculars most of the time, and almost always jumped up at 11:30 no matter what I was doing to watch la Luna.

My professor made a point of asking us what our plans are for dealing with the complaints that arise when we assign moon watching. Your students will probably say it’s too hard or they don’t have time, or who cares? How will we help them? New York City students have busy parents, or one parent, or a guardian, and so many responsibilities. How will you guys, as their teachers, impress upon them that yes, moon watching is as important as everything else, at least for a month. How patient will we be with their process? How supportive?  I came to realize that developing patience for myself, practicing this new subject, was a start. How will I impress upon my students that observing the moon is worthwhile? 

I saw that as I developed a commitment to moon-watching, I learned about many other things besides the wax and wane of the moon. In showing up for the moon I confronted things in myself like impatience, feelings of never being good enough, resistance to new things, and organization. Most importantly I started to see what development and confidence actually are. I saw myself develop from being uncertain and half-hearted about moon-watching to being full of awe and wonder about this beautiful admirer out in space that glows brilliant one a month.

On the night of April 9th, I went outside, expectant of a full moon. I took down the general characteristics and then started to look through my binoculars. It was so wild to see the flatlands and the mountain chains; those bright white dots and lines. I realized that as I sat there, I was doing science. Hey, this is what scientists do; they observe closely what is going on. I wasn’t inside doing something habitual like cooking, cleaning, or depending on information online—I was finding out for myself. I noticed resistance coming on strong because I haven’t developed much confidence in being myself, in being natural, so new tasks seem impossible because I only see things I don’t know, and so much to do, rather than a new area to discover and bring myself into.

As I sketched the moon that night, all kinds of nagging voices emerged, those whining children saying,  “You should be somewhere else,  go inside, it’s cold, your sketch isn’t good enough, hurry up, it’s taking too long, what’s the point?” I decided not to listen and continued sketching.  I found out I could draw all those flatlands that I saw through my binoculars by associating them with a shape. So the upper right looked like a horse and bit by bit I created a fairly accurate sketch.

I started thinking that I really like being out here, in the crisp cold, sketching the moon. The way to know what’s important in a person’s life is by asking them what they do with their time. How do I know what’s important in my life, I thought? By measuring the time I spend doing the things I do, I answered. Cooking as a career used to be very important to me. Making things perfect according to some old, rigid, familial, God knows what idea, used to be important to me. They aren’t anymore. Moon watching is important, and that’s refreshing. How many women or girls do this?  How many mothers take their daughters outside at night and watch the moon?

I am connecting this with being a woman, because although my parents considered education very important, as a child, I didn’t spend my weekends learning how to use a compass, or make up mini-science projects, watch the moon or look through a telescope. I spent my time cooking with my mother—a great thing to do, for sure, but not something that will advance women’s typical conversations or the role of women in the sciences. On a grander scale, what are parents teaching their children? How do parents spend family time together? 

If we as a culture want to advance technologically, and impress on our youth that care and responsibility for the natural world is in everyone’s best interest, then all our students, especially the girls, need to be exposed to hands-on science activities and experiments from a young age.  Fortunately, science teaching has been moving in this direction for a while now and it’s exciting to learn about approaches such as project based learning and expeditionary learning.

My experience with watching the moon is showing me the potential of this kind of learning. When we go outside the lines we’ve drawn in our lives—our habits, expectations, and opinions—to really look closely at the world around us, great things can emerge: responsibility, care, growth, confidence, and optimism. It starts with a willingness to try something new and a commitment to seeing it through. How will I as a teacher support my students in going beyond what they think they know about what is important? How will I continue to challenge myself to do the same thing? These are important questions for me as an educator—and for all of us—to engage with as we push into new ways of living in this magnificent world.

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!

Have a great weekend, sunbeams.

Reduce, Reuse Recycle. We definitely try to live this in my family, although we’re not as hardcore as I’d like to be. In an attempt to make reusing and recycling more appealing to my kids, I’ve been trying to work on projects and point out items in our house that have been “upcycled” in some way.

The kids see us putting the recycling out at the curb on recycling day, but that’s a very abstract concept to them. I wanted to give them some concrete examples of what recycling and reusing looks like in our everyday life. 

I made this cute little shrug for Cheyenne from a boxy old t-shirt that was somewhat worn. It was a hand-me-down that she wasn’t particularly fond of in its original form. Now, as a sweater, she wears it all the time.

I love this lamp. My grandfather had both a passion for stained glass and a tight budget, so he and a friend of his took to making these bottle lamps in their retirement. The glass comes from various coloured beer and wine bottles he salvaged from friends and neighbors. This one used to hang on his three-season porch above the wrought iron nesting tables next to the couch. At night it gave off the prettiest coloured light patterns. He’s been gone for over 10 years now, but the lamps are still here, reminding me of summer evenings spent with my grandparents on their porch.

This is a skirt I made from a pillowcase. It is possibly the easiest garment I have ever sewn. Essentially all I did was cut the pillowcase to the right length and sew an elastic waistband at the top. I’ve made several of these now and the girls absolutely love them.

I used the scraps from the pillowcase skirts to make stuffed animal skirts. Don’t Marjorie and Mr. Fix-it (who is a girl in spite of her name) look ravishing?

Our next project is going to be recycled crayons. I found some huge bags of crayons at the thrift store for $.50 each and thought this would make a great project for my little artists. 

image by Roberto Garcia-S

Alright—so the biggest good news, affirmed again in an awesome talk I went to last night—is that evolution is real and happening. It is always good to think about this again.

The speaker was Michael Dowd, a self proclaimed “Evolutionary Evangelist.” He transformed from a fundamental Christian into a preacher of the awe-inspiring truth of evolution and the practical as well as spiritual significance of the knowledge of it. For example: We now know how our brains developed over millions of years, from the amphibian/limbic part, to the mammalian/emotional bonding section, to mind and interpretative capacities in the neo-cortex and finally to the anterior cortex, whose neurons light up when we make the effort to hold ourselves to a commitment—say, a marriage vow.

As we all find out on a daily basis, our center of gravity unfortunately is not yet located in this more evolved part of our brains, so even if we make decisions or commitments in one moment, we are thrown by uncertainty and desires, left, right and center in the next. But knowing about the differences in these parts of our brains we can interpret our own experience, of lust, say, or of our willingness to sacrifice our principles to get what we want in a very different context.

The most inspiring part of listening to Michael was to hear that his message of a synthesis of science and religion is finding a tremendous response both in absolutely staunch atheists and in church audiences of all denominations. It looks like he is on track to elevate a huge section of American society into a more deeply rational and open mindset, without sacrificing our need for the mystical dimension.

More about Michael and his highly acclaimed bestseller ‘Thank God for Evolution” here.

Today is Obama’s 100th day in office. This is just a symbol of course, but also, even though not everyone thinks he is doing everything right, a good moment to reflect on how much he has set in motion in this time. There is always the cynical monkey on my shoulder, waiting to be right about how things never turn out as well as we might hope. But now—it’s up to everyone to throw their own weight behind what needs to happen. Here is a comprehensive list of Obama’s actions concerning climate change on one of our favorite sites, Worldchanging.com (scroll down half a page or so…). There’s enough good news to inspire us for a whole month at least!

Check out the point about his high speed rail—if realized, we would actually end up with a public transport system like they are running in Europe and Japan, one that doesn’t require lengthy trips to airports, waiting times and enormous levels of pollution. If you have never experienced European trains—it’s a treat boarding the train from Hamburg to Basle, work on your laptop in a spacious seat, be able to walk around anytime and have a coffee at the kiosk or a nice meal at a proper table, and when you get there, you actually still feel like a human being. Maybe someone should try to convince the national airlines to begin investing in this and make themselves part of the future of rail!

On a more personal, close to home kind of note: The activist group that evolved out of the Obama campaign up here is planning an event in the town of Lenox on May 23rd. Our biggest goal is to get people interested and fired up about the possibility of having Berkshire County, MA become a net-zero energy community, meaning we will produce as much energy as we need. In a county that is fiercely trying to preserve its historical roots and houses and whose tourism depends on it, this is a big vision and ambitious goal.

Planning this event, wanting to make sure it is distinct from the hundreds happening all over at this time (a very, very good thing!), we are constantly faced with how challenging it is to lift our eyes to more than the daily little things we can do (instant gratification for the mammalian brain, see above) and keep them focused on a commitment to something that doesn’t exist yet – the frontal cortex, also mentioned above.

One thing keeps striking us: a lot of people are doing incredible things, but are finding it hard, if not impossible, to work together and cooperate—this goes all the way down from big initiatives trying to help in Africa to small scale inventors who have difficulty trusting anyone with their ideas. So our goal is to transmit a possibility of listening, not already knowing and allowing new solutions to emerge between us, rather than having to be the one, or the ones, who have all the answers. Wish us luck!

image by smellyknee>

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!

Your location
SF Bay Area, CA

Your project’s name
Read to Your Baby

What are you creating with this project? What are your goals?
I am a children’s librarian who works in a city with one of the highest rates of violent crime in America. In learning about the connection between parents engaging in literacy activities with infants and the reduced odds of those children becoming involved in violent crime later in life, I came to see what a vital service infant literacy could perform in our communities. Since I work for the public library, my goal is to create infant literacy programming for the branches I serve and generate interest in those programs. I hope to inspire my colleagues to do the same.

Infant literacy has boomed in librarianship in recent years. Children do not start school until at least three years of age; before that, there is no single, consistent, free resource for parents to learn how to educate their infants—and research shows that a child who starts preschool with little preparation will likely never catch up to her peers! The education babies get from their parents—their first, best teachers—will determine their success for the rest of their lives, and there is no single, consistently promoted place for parents to learn how to provide that education.

Every parent preparing for the birth of a child should be told “take her to the library.” Every nursing mother who receives public assistance for food and shelter should also be driven to the nearest library.

How did you get started?
I worked in a library with a strong infant literacy program, and the adults and babies LOVED it. In fact, they loved it so much that the room overflowed with people and songs every Wednesday morning—the crowd was almost unmanageable!

After that job, I spent some time working as a nanny, and was able to work one-on-one with infants for the first time since receiving training in early literacy. The babies I cared for responded amazingly well, and parents were ecstatic. More importantly, though, I also experienced firsthand the frustration and difficulty of spending entire days with an infant, which allowed me to empathize with parents who just do not know what to do with their baby. They do not come with instruction manuals! LIBRARIES, I thought, can provide that instruction manual.

In my current library job, I started an infant storytime and it has been a roaring success. My current community is a wealthy one, and parents there have quickly come to understand the value of infant literacy. Working there has allowed me to hone my skills in teaching parents and babies literacy activities. Now, I want to create and promote similar programs in libraries that serve economically disadvantaged communities, where, statistically, infants receive less exposure to books and reading than in middle- and upper-class ones.

What’s the current state of your project?
Troubled, but optimistic. Financial crisis in our library system is necessitating cuts to programming, materials, staff. IF I manage to hold onto my job through the crisis, I plan to keep suggesting that, if our libraries re-focus children’s services on infant/toddler literacy, we can benefit our communities and also prove that the library is a vital community resource, and has a direct link to violence prevention.

What’s your next milestone? How are you getting there?
I am about to begin a brief stint in a different library, where the community is financially disadvantaged and probably 90% Spanish-speaking. I won’t be there long enough to create a lasting program, but while I am there, I plan to provide storytimes that introduce infant literacy techniques in Spanish, and spend as much time as possible talking with parents one-on-one about infant literacy. If I can even just show a handful of parents the importance of talking to their babies and sharing books with them, I will have accomplished something.

Is this an individual or a team project? How did you assemble your team? How do you work together? Do you work with other organizations?
Both individual and team. I organized my baby storytime on my own; now, I am trying to share it with my colleagues. Most of them have already had training on infant literacy and are convinced of its value. I would like to spread my enthusiasm to them, as well as my belief that a focus on infant literacy can not only improve our communities but also help to preserve our jobs!

My team is the children’s services department at my city’s library, a group of amazingly strong, talented, smart, inventive, and dedicated librarians. I am so excited to see where we might take these ideas in the coming years.

Other organizations: I would love to partner with hospitals and other community health resources to target new parents before and immediately after their children are born.

Why are you doing this? Why is this project important to you? How does it fit into the big picture?
I’ve seen firsthand the difference literacy activities can make in a young child’s life, and know that the advantages she gains can keep her in school as a teenager, keep him out of prison as an adult.

Describe how readers can contribute to or participate in your project
Visit your local library and ask what kinds of programs they have for infant literacy—-baby bounce, Mother Goose on the Loose, Buena Casa Buena Brasa, etc.

If you know a parent of an infant or toddler, encourage them to take their child to their local library and ask the librarian for suggestions, ideas to help develop their child’s literacy skills.

How can The Sunny Way support your activities?
You already have—writing this out has helped me clarify my vision.

Keep up the positive attitude!! Also, connect me with others who are interested in the same project!

image by Shaire Productions

Uli’s pieces last wee