We made it through to another Friday! Time to recap all the lovely sunny goodness on the site this week. And—pssst—it’s our first anniversary next week! How cool is that?!?

• Monday, I wrote about how true optimism can only be earned through action. Mark my words: “Optimism = responsibility” will be the “Where’s the beef?” of 2009.
• Tuesday, Uli updated us on the progress of her Organizing for America group, which has been together since the Obama campaign and is working through their ideas of how to best contribute to the task of perfecting our union.
• Wednesday, Victoria shared her thoughts on supporting children’s development—certainly a powerful way of creating the future—through tutoring.
• Thursday, I spoke of my love for the Little House books, and how important it is to recognize the good values from our past so we can carry them forward.

Today’s video is a short interview with my man Enrique Peñalosa in which he discusses what makes a city great: “We can have a city that is very friendly to cars, or a city that is very friendly to people. We cannot have both ... Mathematically, it is totally impossible to solve the transportation problems of a city using cars.” Mayor Bloomberg seems to have been listening—witness his recent proposal to turn Broadway into a pedestrian-only space.

I find this hugely exciting. I understand that much of the US is built so that cars are necessary, but that is not the case in New York. How great would it be to be able to walk down Broadway enjoying Times Square with plenty of room to move around and without having to worry about getting whacked by a taxi?

More broadly, how great would it be to be able to walk, ride trains, bike, and bus our way to most places that we need to go? If sitting in traffic becomes a thing of the past? My hope is that, as we work to improve infrastructure in this country, we become less dependent on cars and more connected with each other.

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image by are you my rik?

Last week Victoria and I got our life coach, Maia Conty, on the phone to discuss her approach to coaching. We learned a great deal about what coaching is, how it differs from therapy, and how this coach sees her role in helping to create the future.

Maia first came to coaching about three and a half years ago, when she was invited as a guest to a training session. “I was painting with an all-female painting crew and I was up there on top of this really high ladder with a sander and a mask and it was hot as all heck and I’m up there with the sun and all this paint dust ... and I was going, what am I doing here? ... It wasn’t too long after that I was invited as a guest to one of these coaching sessions.”

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image by Chesi - Fotos CC

This is the second of 2 parts of Jessica Roemischer’s interview with Spiral Dynamics wizard Don Beck. Read part one.

Jessica Roemischer: Which candidate do you think is best suited to institute this new trans-partisan approach to governance—Obama or McCain?

Don Beck: I think both candidates have strengths in this regard. But after eight years, the “out party”—the Democrats—are in a much better position to do this because the “in party” is exhausted. When you look at the people Bush has had in important roles, you can see that a party that maintains power for eight years runs out of steam. I think there’s a freshness in the Obama camp and a lot of popular support for him with high levels of energy. I think he’s more equipped to do something like what I’m describing. Certainly Obama’s background also suggests that to us.

Yet, much can be said for McCain—his courage, strength and resolve. He probably has the ability to deal with foreign affairs much better than Obama does. But there are elements to his right which concern me—for example, the element behind so much of the warfare. Similarly, to Obama’s left, that hard liberal system is destructive for us because it won’t institute the kind of policies that are necessary for most of the population. I’m worried about extremity on both sides of them.

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image by Chesi - Fotos CC

Jessica’s interview with Spiral Dynamics wizard Don Beck continues the conversation on integral views of sticky subjects that Uli started yesterday. Understanding and including all points of view can be difficult when the air is charged with so many polarized views as it is in this election season. My own feelings lead me toward the far-left viewpoints I’ve always espoused, while my intention leads me toward a more integral view, so I’m grateful for Dr. Beck’s perspective as it gives me a framework to understand and choose my reactions.

Jessica is doing wonderful work to awaken through music the transformative power of beauty in each of us and to bring integral perspectives into view. I’m grateful for the opportunity to include her voice on The Sunny Way, as her work embodies exactly what we are trying to create—a new way of living and relating with each other that reaches into and elicits the best parts of what it means to be human. -ed.

As I’ve watched the presidential campaign unfold in my living room, I’ve become increasingly unsettled by the cultural schism it’s revealing. Robo-calls from John McCain, caustic opinion pieces on Sarah Palin (often by women), FOX news, MSNBC, negative campaigning—Left and Right. In this highly charged atmosphere, it’s been difficult to make sense of things. I’ve even questioned my longstanding allegiance to the Democratic Party, which has made it challenging to find common ground with friends I’ve known for years. In search of a different perspective on the election, I was compelled to seek out global activist, Dr. Don E. Beck, whom I interviewed in 2002 for What is Enlightenment? Magazine (now EnlightenNext magazine).

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Composting in the garden

This is the third of three parts of Victoria’s interview with Sister Jeanne Clark of the Homecoming project and Sophia Garden. Read part one and part two.

VG: When did you decide to become a nun?

SJ: In 1958 at the age of twenty-one, I entered the convent. Before that I worked as a secretary in an advertising agency for three years.

VG: And you grew up on Long Island? Is that why you were saying you wanted to come home?

SJ: When I speak about “Coming Home” I’m really talking about coming home to Earth and the Universe. Actually when I first came into the understanding of myself as coming out of Earth and being so connected with Earth, I wanted to help others see this connection.

I wanted to do the work that I am doing now on the West Coast where I had spent five years. It was so beautiful there right near Seattle and in the midst of the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. I thought of the people there as much more progressive. And to me at the time Long Island seemed like a wasteland of consumerism. I didn’t want to stay here.

But my congregation of Dominican Sisters wanted me to stay as did my friends and the people with whom I had been meeting and envisioning living life sustainably on Long Island.

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The universe with sticks

This is the second of three parts of Victoria’s interview with Sister Jeanne Clark of the Homecoming project and Sophia Garden. Read part one.

SJ: It is a challenge. Things are changing. It’s all part of the evolution. We are becoming different people. We offer three children’s programs in the summer. A new group started today. The children learned about the story of the universe and how the universe came to be.

VG: Oh my, it’s so important that you are teaching children about the universe.

SJ: Yes. They find out where Earth came from and that we are part of Earth. The first thing many of the children do when they come to the garden is swat the bees and the ants. I tell them, “Oh wait a minute. We are outdoors now. This is where these creatures live. This is their home. The ants probably do a lot more work for Earth than we do. We leave them here; we don’t kill them.”

Then we teach them the Story of the Universe and how it came to be. They see how the humans enter late in the Story and how they are part of the WEB of life. So we are teaching people about Earth through Sophia Learning Center and providing certified organic food through Sophia Garden. These are the two projects of Homecoming.

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Sister Jeanne with children

Sophia Garden is a 1½ acre certified organic farm in Amityville, Long Island. It lies on land owned by the Dominican Sisters of Amityville. Towards the back of their property is the farm, a colorful, lively area of vegetables, flowers, tool and harvest sheds. In late 1996, the Sophia Garden was started on a section of the Dominican sisters’ land that was an orchard in years gone by. The farm produces organic vegetables within the CSA model of agriculture that joins suburban families with locally grown organic produce. In 2006, the farm was moved to a different area of the sisters’ property where it currently exists.

In our Sunny Way efforts to open up dialogue, and listen to varied perspectives, we thought that reaching out to religious communities could foster relationships to figure out how we’re going to create an inspiring, hopeful future where all of life, in all its variety is cherished and encouraged to thrive.

I interviewed Sr. Jeanne this past August in the garden. She spoke about her life, dreams, and works for social justice. I was so impressed by her courage and vision to start the Sophia Garden that I decided to volunteer there once per week. I am learning how to approach the time I spend there with absolute openness and humility. There’s so much to be curious about when I greet the garden’s plants, insects, and people with a truly open mind. It’s also fun and rewarding to see the vegetables thrive from my careful weeding.

Sr. Jeanne’s story unfolds beautifully in this interview. She has transformed her own search for community and home into a vibrantly accessible garden and learning program that suburban Long Islanders are rejoicing in.

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In preparation for our discussion of Island starting next week, I went looking on Youtube for interviews with Aldous Huxley. In this snippet, you can hear him talk about problems that we are still facing today, 50 years later, as well as his ideas on how we can solve these problems using “all our goodwill, all our intelligence, and all our knowledge.”

What I find most interesting is that he considers problems of politics unsolvable, and problems of ecology possibly solvable, and so advocates shifting our attention from one to the other: “It’s high time we started thinking not merely in terms of politics and ideology but in terms of biology and the relationship of man to his environment.”

You can watch the full interview (around 20 minutes long) after the jump. Huxley’s ideas reverberate today as much as or even moreso than in his own time.

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I met Robert Bisson at the first Move On! event I ever went to. We were to gather in Hudson, NY on a steamy summer afternoon at a gas station to let voters know about the connections between John McCain and the big oil companies and the difference in the presidential candidates’ energy policies. “Bring an umbrella,” Robert had written to the participants, “it’s likely we’ll get a thunderstorm.”

When I got there, this lively activist with the energy of a mischievous and optimistic ten year old was setting up signs. Only later, when contacting him for this article did I find out, that he is about to turn 78.

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For the last few months, my friend Cathy has been telling me, “You have to meet Shumin! She does environmental short films for Science Friday on NPR and you will love her!”

Luckily, this week, I finally did get to meet her, and Cathy was right—the woman and her work are both warm and interesting. She emigrated to New York with her family in 1985, grew up in the city, and spent most of the last decade traveling around the world learning the art of filmmaking by making lots of films.

What I love about her films is their simplicity. They let the stories tell themselves. When the form falls away and the content shines through, you can really connect with the story that’s being told. These films educate, but not in a pedantic way—information is transmitted through the eyes of people engaged with the work. From shopping for fish in Chinatown to learning about Lunar New Year, Shumin’s work celebrates people and the things they do.

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Fifteen years ago, Nick Rosen wanted to buy a little holiday home, and the most affordable option was a little shepherd’s hut up in the mountains.

“I found it was a really good way of life,” he told me in an interview last month, “that allowed me to unplug from the system and develop myself rather than worrying about work. I found something which had all sorts of benefits and seemingly no negatives. It’s cheap or free, it’s good for the environment, and it’s good for my soul. And for all those reasons, I want to recommend it to other people.”

I found Nick’s story fascinating. A journalist, former professor, and long-time environmental campaigner, he now fills his days talking to people about living off-grid and providing them with the real support and information they need to make it work, via his website, Off-grid.net and a guidebook he has written, How to Live Off-Grid.

“This idea that you could wake up in a little cabin, light a few candles, light the woodburning stove, go out and chop some wood, seems like some sort of romantic dream that if you actually had to do it, up close, would be cold and full of spiders. But in fact when you get there, it really is just as romantic as the dream.”

My only experience with off-grid living was a week spent with a friend at a cabin in the West Virginia mountains. Each morning I’d wake up and get the woodburning stove going, trek up the hill to the pump to get water, and come back down to make coffee and fry eggs for our breakfast. Afternoons were filled with writing and reading, evenings with guitar playing and conversation and oil lamps. I found it incredibly satisfying.

Of course, chopping wood and carrying water are slower than stopping at Starbucks, and when you have to be on the subway at 8:30 am, not very practical. But what if your expenses were low enough that you could support yourself without going to work?

Going off-grid doesn’t appeal to everyone, but it certainly does to me. And there are benefits beyond simple enjoyment of being intimately involved in the details of taking care of one’s own needs.

“I’m not trying to argue that this is for everybody, and I’m not trying to tell everyone in America that they should go off-grid. But I am trying to say that it would be very good for the country if a few million households were off the grid. It would be good in terms of helping the environment, reducing energy consumption, reducing water consumption,” Nick says.

“And there’s also another important reason which is resilience. Everyone’s talking about energy security at the moment, the price of gas is going up, there’s food rationing just beginning with rice at least in America, and the idea that there could be a few million people who were self-sufficient for energy and possibly for food as well actually would make the country as a whole stronger. So there are actually good national reasons why it’s a good idea to go off-grid.”

Nick’s thoughts on going off-grid struck me as pragmatic as well as profound. As the world gets more top-heavy with bureaucracy, his tactic of working to change laws so that people can more easily take their destinies and livelihoods into their own hands makes a great deal of sense.

I also appreciated his language, filled with words like “possibility” and “decentralization” and “community.” You’ll notice he doesn’t talk about hunkering down in a bunker and waiting for the apocalypse. The model he presents—households working together in community to share resources, challenges, and information—is nothing less than the 21st century update of the pioneer concept.

Have a listen to my interview with him and check out his amazingly informative website and let us know what you think. Could you go off the grid? Why or why not? I think I could, but not in Brooklyn. :)

This is an interview conducted over the phone with Jane Riddford, who is the founder of Global Generation, a London-based charity. I have known and been friends with Jane since 2004 when we were both students of Andrew Cohen, a modern day spiritual teacher. At the time I knew what she was doing was cool, but I didn’t realize that it is really the future of humanity—a global world, with global citizens, each with something worth living for, working together. So a few years on, I thought it would make perfect sense to do a interview with her for the Sunny Way as we share this same desire.

The focus of Global Generation is helping kids, teenagers, and young people to understand that nature is a part of who they already are. For many of these kids growing up in London, nature is almost completely alien to them, and just reconnecting helped them have a deeper connection to themselves and what it really means to be human today.

From there the program links ecology in to society using practical experiences. The kids plant, grow, spend time in the countryside, green up city buildings, and work to bring nature back into the city. All of this brings them a hands-on knowledge of the interconnection of our urban and rural landscapes, as well as a grounded understanding of their place as part of the whole.

Global Generation itself represents the next generation of organization, always changing, reconfiguring and working out what works now, not what worked last month. Jane told me its ultimate objective is to not exist anymore because then everyone will be living and expressing it! To some that may sound idealistic but to me it sounds like an objective worthy of truly inspiring the next generation of emerging adults.

The Sunny Way would like to say Go Jane!

Following are some quotes to whet your appetite. You can download the entire interview here, and click on through to the Global Generation website for more information.

“The biggest thing was these different groups of kids all being together, there were all these activities we do but for me when they suddenly they stop and go ‘oh wow its really quiet here’, or seeing the sun go down, which is like watching the earth turn. The most important thing is getting a bigger view, and that it is cool to care, care for oneself, care for each other and care for the planet.”

“By degrees we evolved the concept of living roofs into a living building, the idea of bringing life into a office building, and having kids to do that. Then we started to notice bringing kids into a business environment. What they started to realize was this wasn’t school this was real life. Also having kids in the environment, we got people working in the building it brought out a sense of responsibility in them and animated some kind of consciousness in the whole situation.”

“We’ve seen rapid change in 6 months, very cynical, very ‘Whatever’ teenage girls ... it was a big shock to them. With no electricity no curling tongs, we had to work really hard, but then somehow by the end of the 4 days we knew a bubble had burst, but we didn’t know where it was gonna lead, and thought we were being very idealistic ... then a week later the most challenging of the group, suddenly the penny dropped and she saw we weren’t asking her to be a tree hugger! It was important to have that experience, she got it and understood her experience, why we had taken them out, and how it translates into a office building in the middle of London, and what businesses are doing, and I remember her suddenly turning to me and saying ‘Jane you’ve got to shout about this! You’ve gotta get the message out!’”