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Happy New Year!

Into the light

In South Africa I first heard a quote attributed to Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural address. Mandela never actually said these words; they are from American peace activist Marianne Williamson. But the sentiment hasn’t been harmed by the association.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of a higher power that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

It has been a decade since I lived with a black South African family, but watching the township scenes from Invictus yesterday took me back there in a heartbeat.

At 6AM I awaken, shivering against the cold of the Highveld, and stumble into the kitchen. Ma is already awake. She scrapes out the last of last night’s ashes into the metal bucket and hands it to me. I carry it outside and exchange it for a bucket of the coal that is heaped between the concrete house and the concrete fence which encircles the property, the fence which separates our house from a maze of similar houses crowding each other like a heap of squirming puppies. Soon the water to bathe the little ones is steaming on the fire and I walk across the small concrete courtyard to the bedroom. Brian is already up and gone to work, Bongani is still snoring, and I am grateful for the chance to wake Zama, 8, and Wandile, 4. I try to wake them the way my own mother woke me when I was their age: tenderly. In the township, the “location” as it is called by everyone living there, there is precious little space for tenderness.

After bathing the children Ma serves them a hot porridge of oats. Wandile, having momentarily opened his eyes in the metal basin of bathwater, is now falling asleep in his oats. Zama pokes him and Wandile lets out a cry. Soon it will be time for school.

While the children eat I take my daily walk. Our house is close to the edge of the location proper, and soon I am crossing the earthen dam that serves as a walkway across the swamp. The location was built on a swamp. No: it was relocated to the swamp. As I climb the hill on the other side, I walk among ruins. These are the ruins of houses built before Apartheid, houses razed to create a separation between the current low location and the high Afrikaaner farming town. Now, 50 years later, the new Mandela government is trying to erase that separation by once again building on the slope, throwing up a restless but orderly row of brick dwellings.

From the crest of the hill where the railroad runs its load of coal I look upon my home.

In the crisp morning air a pall of smoke hangs over the location. It burns the eyes, dirties the pastels of the concrete houses, sullies the clothes hung to dry. It strikes me that the only thing about the township that is not black are its people. They know: they are children of God. They are not afraid to let their light shine. For generations they have waited for this day. And just as they did during the long years of Apartheid, they will start this day by taking care of their little ones. They will bathe them. Dress them. Feed them. Send them up the hill through the bones of their ancestors, to school, where against all odds some of them will make it.

The dark side

“All of us have this extraordinary capacity for evil, but equally we have this remarkable capacity for good.” —Desmond Tutu, from a speech on genocide

In one week the Northern Hemisphere will experience its darkest day of the year.

It seemed an appropriate time to look in the mirror and explore my own darkness. But this is hard to do with the lights off. I try closing my eyes, and that helps a little.

Desmond Tutu was speaking of the horrors that unfolded in Rwanda and of those that continue to unfold daily in the Sudan. He asserted that to understand these things we must explore the possibility that the perpetrators could be we the horrified. To understand this human capacity for darkness not in order to condone it, but to better bring about conditions in which it is less likely to happen.

And what is darkness but the absence of light?

What is evil? Is it merely the absence of good?

Do I even believe in the idea of good and evil? Certainly my conditioning is to seek out the unmet need behind every act of hurting. This is not to deny culpability for action, my own or others; rather, I find it more productive to think in terms of what might make us as humans more likely to play nicely together.

When I look inside, what do I see? In reflecting on times when I have acted in a way that hurt others, usually I can identify: I wanted food. I wanted rest. I wanted recognition. To be able to contribute, to be listened to, to listen and understand. Sometimes the need was concrete and I just couldn’t meet it. Sometimes it was intangible and I wasn’t able to articulate it.

Certainly it is easy to imagine that everyone would want these things, starting with “basic needs.” But Maslow himself believed that the idea of a hierarchy of needs falsely implies that those needs at the bottom are less important than those at the top, in terms of nurturing a healthy community and not just a living individual. Needs for love, morality, spontaneity, lack of prejudice, etc., are as essential to a healthy community as clean water. In the absence of any one of these, hurtful behavior is more likely to flourish. In the absence of several at once we see war and famine, poverty and exploitation.

My mind wanders into associating pairs of opposites with positive or negative feelings: light and dark, warmth and cold, sound and silence...
...but to a migraine sufferer, it is darkness, not light, that is soothing...freezing is necessary for ice cream.... noise can be music or cacophony...knowledge and ignorance...is ignorance ever good?...certainly knowledge can be used for harm...has our technology outpaced our ability to control our basic impulses...what are our fundamental needs—

—suddenly I look up and an hour has gone by and I’m still alone at the computer and I’ve not furthered my understanding at all with that last paragraph and, and, I really need to pee. I get up and pee. Having done that, I realize I’m needing the opposite of aloneness. I need connection and community.

After leaving a couple voicemails I connect with an actual person. In seconds we are laughing. A happy glow fills my stomach, driving away the winter darkness.

If forced to make a hierarchy and designate one need as the most important, I would say it is connection. Connecting lives, sitting down and sharing laughter and a meal and ourselves with others, has the potential to, if not heal the world, at least take it in that direction.

As Tutu says, “A person is a person through other persons. I would not know how to be a human being at all except I learned this from other human beings.”

Creativity Part Deux

(written Friday Dec.4th--posted today!) Last week I wrote about creativity. I stated that gratitude and curiosity are essential to creativity. But I did not explain why these things are so important. Nor, beyond offering some quotes and making vague references to the world needing some creative solutions to its myriad problems, did I explain why creativity itself matters.

It is not just that we have myriad problems. It is that we are stuck: our growth cannot continue forever on our finite planet. But we can get stuck in much smaller ways too, and creativity is just as necessary for getting un-stuck.

Right now I am stuck. I need creativity. LL and I just had a difficult conversation about family. I am sad and I am stuck and I want to feel something different. So let me apply my own approach.

I am grateful for—no;

I am curious about—no;

I am sad because—

yes, that's it. Gratitude must start with acknowledging why I feel sad. I am sad because my goal, my hope, is always to increase understanding between people. Tonight I think I did not do that. In what way did I do the opposite of my intention? Perhaps by talking more than I listened. That's often a clue. Perhaps by offering an example of my own sorrow. Instead of comparing, I could have been reflecting back what I thought I heard being said, asking for clarification, confirming that what I heard were the feelings being expressed. Comparison to someone else’s situation rarely helps anyone feel better.

So now I am both grateful and curious: grateful for this moment of reflection which has helped me to see why I did not contribute to understanding, and curious about what LL was and is feeling.

It is tempting at this point to jump from gratitude straight to exposition about creativity. But I somehow think that wouldn't be very creative. A sculpture is not crafted of thin air. It is crafted of thick stone. What is the stone with which I am wrestling here?

Suddenly I feel very small indeed. Like an ant, armed with a splinter from a toothpick, huddled at the foot of a granite mountain. This mountain, this stone, is our family, mine, LL's, ours. I have no more business sculpting something of it than an ant has to carve a sculpture out of a mountain--and thankfully, no more ability. Some things are not meant to be created. They are meant to be appreciated. They are meant to be listened to, explored, loved, allowed to grow, blossom, change with the seasons.

Now I have—

I—

I am so grateful for this family of ours. I am so grateful for each and every one of us. Sitting here at my keyboard crying, I am so curious. I am a tiny ant curious to know more about this daunting and beautiful mountain before me, at once familiar and unfamiliar. How does it change with the seasons? In winter how dark and cold does it get? does the wind howl off of jagged peaks? does the snow fall silently, gently, peacefully, bending the trees to snuggle together under a soft blanket? in spring do wildflowers shoot up daringly between rock and rivulet? on a sunny day is the water of the high lakes cool and inviting? what wondrous creatures call this mountain home? what lives here? what dies? what is everlasting?

Some things are worthy of a lifetime of observation and love. Among these are mountains, and families—and forgive me for such an awkward and potentially distant metaphor! I was fortunate to grow up knowing intimately the mountains above our tiny town, and the above paragraph cannot begin to tell of their warm and familiar wonder.

In such cases the creativity comes in the observing, the loving. The understanding.

As a footnote, this is probably applicable as a great start to our world problems as well: before we go about creating, we would do well to observe, love, and understand.

Uncontain yourself

"Find creativity in every act, and do not sacrifice your need to be creative. Creativity is one of the greatest medicines ever. Exercise it in the way you wash dishes, in the way you walk down the street, in the way you make art. Creativity is essential nourishment. It is not a cute thing to add to your community, nor a luxury, as our government implies. It is the very soul of our sense of self-worth." —Dr. Hunter Patch Adams, Passion and Persistence

"we have to create
it is the only thing louder than destruction
it is the only chance the bars are going to break,
our hands full of color
reaching towards the sky
a brushstroke in the dark
it is not too late
that starry night
is not yet dry"
—Andrea Gibson, Yellowbird

As I was contemplating a blog over the summer I wondered if it would be a waste of time, mine and everyone else's. There is such a plethora, plenitude, proliferation, Pandora's box of content being generated literally every second—

Stop. That is the problem right there. Not the amount of content. That, that indulgence in words for words’ sake when there is stuff that needs to be said. Important stuff. Stuff like Ric O’Barry’s The Cove, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. The fact that $25,000 a minute is being paid as debt to the richest nations of the world by the poorest. (Democracy Now interview on upcoming documentary The End of Poverty.)

If we are to even begin to confront such problems, we cannot stick to our same ways of thinking. Albert Einstein said something to the effect of having to solve a problem on a different level than that on which it was created. We must employ creativity. We must employ creativity not only in tackling issues such as dolphin slaughter in Japan or segregation in South Africa or poverty the world over, but in our everyday lives.

In creating a blog it is essential for me to acknowledge that not only do I not have "the answers to life's persistent questions" (ala Guy Noir), I also desperately need your help and creativity to find them.

Two ingredients are essential for creativity. One is gratitude, whether it is the gratitude for life that drives a salmon to swim hundreds of miles up impossible rapids or the gratitude that slowly seeps into my heart when I can hear the "constructive" in a sharply worded "constructive criticism." The second is curiosity. A genuine curiosity about what could happen differently, when approaching a situation whose outcome I might all-too-hastily write off as unchangeable. This is the sort of curiosity that I think is at the heart of being a good doctor, a good friend, a good partner.

Armed now with gratitude for the opportunity to write this blog and curiosity about what might happen, I am ready to engage you in our first creative challenge. We will skip over trivial tasks such as world peace and environmental sustainability and get straight to the good stuff. Patch Adams speaks about the kind of passion that loves scutwork. If you can’t make scutwork fun, how do ever expect to make the abolition of nuclear weapons fun? I am curious about your creativity in dishwashing.

So uncontain yourself! Go wild with creativity. And wash your dishes at the same time! To the reader who sends in the most interesting picture of something to do with dishwashing, I will send one bar of quality organic fair-trade dark chocolate.

One example of this might be the simple "finished product," i.e. the stack of dishes, and I’ve included some examples of my own. But by no means should you feel limited to this! If you want to wash the dishes wearing a gorilla suit, or in the bathtub, or hang them from a clothesline...endless possibilities.

Simply reply to the blog with your pictures (no more than 5 per entry), or if you run into challenges with that you can email them to me at nedhammar@gmail.com and I will post them for you. If yours is the winning entry, I will contact you for a mailing address and send you a chocolate bar.

Please note that I take no responsibility for any dish disasters that might occur. Have fun!

Maintenance

The blog (or rather, its author) is temporarily down this week for maintenance.

Please enjoy past postings. We (even more fun than writing about myself in the third person is writing in the plural!) will be back on our regular schedule next Monday, barring any unforeseen tsunamis, tiramisus, or tsetse attacks.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving! love, Ned

Rain

"The next world war will be over water."
-Ismail Serageldin, former World Bank vice president

It is a Monday afternoon and I am sitting in the beautiful, light, spacious, dry open reading room of the Sojourner-Truth Library. For the moment I am alone. The study tables have not yet filled up with the children of the East African immigrants who make up my neighborhood. Outside it is doing what it does best in Seattle, raining.

That’s a bit unfair. Seattle receives on average 37 inches of rain per year, less than New York’s 46 or Portland’s 45 and paling beside areas of the Olympic Rainforest that receive 160 inches per year. Yet this rainforest is nothing next to Lloró, Columbia. Lloró "is probably the [town] with the largest measured rainfall in the world," at 523.6 inches per year or 43-plus feet (Wikipedia). That’s more than a foot of wetness for every inch that Seattle gets.

LL and I are considering moving to Central Washington next year, with its average annual precipitation of about 7 inches. Unlike Lloró and more like East Africa and much of the rest of the world, it is dry.

Yet when looking at a map it strikes me as odd that there are several areas of this desert which look, well, wet. I was aware, having driven east on I-90, of Moses Lake; just south on the map is an even larger body of water called Potholes. These lakes look out of place. They are.

At the dawn of the 20th century the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was formed with the purpose of irrigating the arid West. In 1933 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the construction of its largest project, Washington’s Columbia Basin Project and Grand Coulee Dam. The 550-foot dam was completed in 1942 and raised the Columbia River almost 400 feet. Since the early 1950’s water has been pumped, at an annual volume greater than the flow of the Colorado, an additional 280 vertical feet in order to feed a vast network of irrigation projects and waterways including Lakes Moses and Potholes. This is Washington’s fruit bowl, bread basket, wine cellar. Electricity from the dam powers Seattle, Portland, and cities as far south as San Diego.

An annual salmon run estimated at more than 600,000 fish was completely wiped out. So too was the subsistence for countless Native Americans.

Perhaps the fact of the dam’s existence would not be as jarring if FDR’s vision of a Second Bill of Rights had come to pass. That all people were guaranteed, through a government of, by, and for the people, such things as medical care, education, a living wage, and "freedom from unfair competition and monopolies." As it happened, recompense to Native Americans was late in coming and is pennies to the dollar of the Columbia Basin Project’s profit. Irrigated land that was slated to go to small family farms ended up going to huge agribusiness, and water which was to have been paid for by landowners became subsidized.

The loss of the salmon was never even considered.

As a library poster about the Olympic Peninsula reminds me, "not everyone is so lucky" to receive as much rain as this coastal region gets. Attempts to irrigate the desert are not new. They are as old as the first city-states. But these precursors of modern civilization were built on people taking more from the earth than would come naturally. And ever since they started doing this, what they took they distributed unequally. Now more than ever we continue to do this. Apart from the environmental destruction caused by taking more, I wonder if we would ever be able to irrigate new rainless areas for the growing of apples, or destroy mountaintops for the extraction of coal, or chop redwoods for the building of houses without a few people receiving a hugely disproportionate share of those apples and coal and houses.

Perhaps until we figure that out, we would do well to try and share what we have, to accept the fabulously rich bounty of nature as it is found…naturally. And be grateful for the rain.

3-yr-old Thanks

Sunday, Nov. 5th, 2006

Today I returned home
from a retreat which in my 1966 Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopedic Dictionary
has seven (7) meanings as a noun: the first of which is “the act of
[going back or backwards; withdrawing; retiring]” and the last
“an establishment for the mentally ill;
for alcoholics, etc.”,
and in between,
“the retirement…from a position of danger or from an enemy”,
“retirement, seclusion, solitude”, and
“…a refuge; haunt”—
retreat: re-, back, plus trahere, to draw—
funny.
Are we alcoholic crazies in need of a secluded haunt?
Are we retiring from engagement with a dangerous enemy?
Are we going backwards?
Funny, because during this retreat, most of us chose
to engage
to enter into new and dare I say sometimes dangerous conversational territory
and yes to get a little alcoholic and/or crazy
and yet for me at least none of it felt like going back
so much as catching up—
catching up with a 2-year-old a 7-year-old and a soccer ball
with non-pumpkin spice pancakes served piping hot
with the rain we so seldom take the time to enjoy
with laughter
with love
with friends and their families and I find myself searching
for a word that means the opposite of retreat
and the best my 1966 Reader’s Digest Dictionary has to offer
is pro-, forward, plus gradi-, to walk:
progress and this non-poem should end here but it doesn’t:
doesn’t because today I returned home
not from a retreat but from progress
returned home and almost retreated into the all-too-familiar
solitary backwards haunts of my mind where the whole world
seems a dangerous enemy and I lose sight
of friends and family against the wave
of unanswered unavoidable questions—

will the world survive to see my grandchildren?
will my children grow up amidst peace or not at all?
will I find that special someone and have have children?
will I survive—

this residency, this month, this present moment?
Is it possible for one man to change
not the world, or the dominant paradigm, or his clothes
but oneself?
and as I find myself retreating from the progress of the weekend
there are two things that pull me onward, upright, even forward:
one,
the attempt to try and begin to start to articulate this,
and two,
you,
for being willing to listen, to hear, and to forgive
when my vocabulary fails to capture my inexpressible
thanks.

Sunday, Nov. 8th, 2009: Thank you thank you thank you THANK YOU, my special someone!!!

Endings

On December 21st, 2012, the world as we know it will end.

This date marks the end of the Mayan calendar, and all nature of things is predicted to happen. My older brother has been telling me about this for years. When it was discussed on NPR this summer, though, I knew the idea was getting out there. Some say it will be an apocalypse. Others, include my brother, are preparing for a global spiritual awakening. If you want to get an idea of the possibilities, go to the theaters in a couple weeks when "2012" opens. Though all the previews seem to feature tsunamis washing away New York and Mt. Everest, I'm sure it will actually be a quiet and meditative inquiry into the soul.

Let us suppose for a minute that nothing happens on December 21st, 2012. Let us suppose that we will wake up on December 22nd and the world is still here, physically and ethereally unchanged. But let us suppose that on that day we could bring an end to anything we now see as being impossible to end. What would we end?

I would like to propose that for a start we bring an end to the idea that there is anything that we cannot end.

This is not to promote blind hope, nor an ignorance for the work, the struggle, that goes into change. Rather it is to take on the work that needs to be done with our feet firmly on the ground and our minds open to the possibility that we might succeed.

On April 27th, 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa, bringing an end to 48 years of Apartheid rule and hundreds of years of racial segregation. I had the opportunity to serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mpumalanga (formerly the Eastern Transvaal) starting in 1998, only four years after this historic moment. In my role as a "school and community resource advocate" I worked with both white Afrikaners and black Africans, in part because many black laborers still worked on white-owned farms and sent their children to "farm schools" built on the land.

Among the lessons I learned was that things weren't entirely black and white. Although opportunities for black students were severely curtailed, many farmers had worked quite cooperatively with their schools and provided the best they could within the confines of Apartheid. With a new government and the radical new idea that all people were created as equals, the schools and farmers were in the midst of a transition that was exciting, transformative and often painful. Some Afrikaners turned their backs entirely on what used to be "their" schools. But others didn't. They were willing to come to the table and work with the Africans in a new role, as equals. In these moments, which as an outsider I was sometimes able to facilitate, I would catch glimpses of that most miraculous of things--the opening of a human mind.

In these moments I would get an inkling of the history, all the moments and years of hate, misunderstanding, and somehow carrying on with life despite hate and misunderstanding, that had led up to the present.

Only a year ago tomorrow, Barack Obama was elected president of the U.S. So many hopes and dreams have been pinned on him that I don't envy him his job. Michael Moore, in his latest film, "Capitalism," seems to be pleading to what he clearly sees as Obama's better side--the Obama who sides with the little guy, rather than the big corporation. Moore asks us to help him in bringing an end to capitalism as it exists now, in which the richest 1% of the population control 95% of the wealth and entities like Wal-Mart, Bank of America and Citigroup are allowed to take out "dead peasant" life insurance policies that allow them to profit from the death of an employee. Moore is asking us--and Barack Obama--to take part in a peasants' revolt.

Just as it is never too late to do the right thing, so too it is never too early. It is never too early to change ourselves for the better. Sometimes I find myself paralyzed when contemplating a positive action, because I am scared. I am scared to stick my neck out and look like a fool. It is so much easier to stay in my shell of life-as-it's-always-been and let the world alone. But as Anais Nin says, "There [comes] a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it [takes] to blossom."

December 22nd, 2012, can start whenever we choose it to. Peasants, let us organize and revolt. One cannot say how many years or lifetimes it will take to achieve our goals. But is time to blossom.

Rebels

On a good night I dream I am flying, dancing, making love, or (the best) all three at once. On a bad night I have nightmares. When I was little the worst ones involved being chased by bulls—bulls that in real life we kids would encounter while biking the dirt roads of Halfway, OR. But the next worst ones involved school: that assignment I somehow completely neglected, or suddenly realizing I'd been going to the wrong classroom—for months. This kind of dream, perhaps because I still operate in a world of tasks, I still have.

It is Sunday night and my self-imposed deadline for posting the week's blog is breathing down my neck. I have been fortunate to have had a fabulous weekend of catching up with friends and loved ones. LL and I have just finished a meal of the season's first home-made pumpkin soup and are discussing our schedules, and why they are that way. There are a good fifty things I would love to do in the next five minutes, including:
—write a letter of outrage to the AAFP for its appalling new alliance with Coca-Cola
—email and call friends I need to catch up with, and write some more thank-you cards
—read a dozen articles in various journals as well as the next chapter in "The Hypomanic Edge," John Gartner's fascinating look at, well, why it's Sunday night and I'm writing a blog instead of relaxing in preparation for bed
—draw/paint a bit on my own books (LL just helped me reach a breakthrough in understanding the first book)

The list goes on. Some of these things I will get to in due time, others will inevitably be postponed past the time I think they "should have" gotten done. Why on earth do we Americans, more than any other people, assign ourselves so many tasks that we have nightmares about failing to complete them?

And what are the implications of this endless on-the-go doing, for ourselves, our health, our world?

I am coming to believe that this pace of living keeps us from living well. And by living well, I mean simply living in a way that first does no harm. Living in a way that is sustainable, happy, and sustainably happy.

The double-edged sword of despair and hope, for me, is that this way of life is the path of least resistance: In America, it is easier than not to work a job that requires long hours, to commute to work by car, to have little of one's income support healthcare, education, the environment. But in other countries, as travel writer Rick Steves reminded me recently, there is a different path of least resistance. Your job pays you to take time off, including for maternity leave, for moms and dads. Public transit is cheap, efficient, universal. Taxes go towards true social security, rather than to fund wars and favor corporations. And just because America may be, as John Gartner argues in "The Hypomanic Edge," self-selected for nonstop doing, there is no reason we can't point that in the direction of doing good.

What this will take, however, is a rebellion. It will require us to not accept things as they are, until they are the way the way we want them to be. It will require us to think more—and do, at least within the current system as it operates now, less.

Which brings me at last to the quote that I wanted to share, from the book "Nonviolent Communication" by Marshall Rosenberg. The author "shares the sentiments of French novelist and journalist Georges Bernanos..." Here is what Bernanos, who fought in WWI and saw his three sons fight in WWII, has to say:

"I have thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself...but the docility, the lack of responsibility of the modern man, his base subservient acceptance of every common decree. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile men."

It is 24 hours later. I worked today, I work tomorrow. I want to sleep more than rebel. But perhaps tonight I will dream of flying.

Words and pictures

What is the value of words and pictures? Of ideas?

I have now self-published but am only just starting the journey of (hopefully) being accepted by a large publishing house. If I hadn't embarked on that journey, this blog would have been started much later or not at all. I am trying to post—mostly words—here, weekly, for free, and simultaneously to get my books—mostly pictures—printed, in bookstores, not for free. In both efforts I am learning a lot about the Information Age, and the value of ideas.

My father receives The New Yorker magazine. Along with walking our black lab Hugo and either shoveling snow or jumping in the pond, season-dependent, one of my favorite activities when I visit home is to catch up on old issues. In the July 6, 2009 issue was a book review by Malcolm Gladwell, of Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price." Gladwell takes issue with Anderson's thesis that "information wants to be free," arguing that just as the infrastructure and maintenance of power lines and plants is necessary to deliver even electricity that could be generated freely, so too there is a non-negligible infrastructure for delivering ideas. The cost of transmission electronically might approach zero. But a number close to zero multiplied by several billion, as in the case of the number of YouTube videos streamed, is still a large number. According to Gladwell, YouTube, offering free content, is set to lose "close to half a billion dollars" in 2009.

Then there is the question of content. The obvious item to discuss would be not ideas, but chocolate.

People place some value on quality, and are willing to pay for it. Gladwell points to an experiment in which a majority of people selected fancy truffles over Hershey's Kisses when they were priced at 15 cents and 1 cent, respectively, but selected the Kisses over the truffles when the prices were 14 cents and free. Amazing that only 1 cent in both cases made the difference! But read in reverse the experiment is equally astounding: When two chocolates both cost anything, most people were willing to pay 15 times more for quality.

There are two further issues which Gladwell hints at but does not delve into. One is format: How do we like to receive our ideas? There were several predictions that books would essentially fold with the advent of the Internet. This has not happened even despite Kindle, because some of us, me included, enjoy actual books. There is a fabulous cartoon by Berkely Breathed that comes to mind: Opus dreams of curling up with his favorite copy of "Winnie the Pooh" and in the last panel ends up tucked into an armchair staring dejectedly at the CD that his friend Milo has given him.

Second is the broader issue of "support of the arts," seemingly a doomed enterprise in our current politico-economic climate. People are willing to support, beyond the cost of the goods received, those we think are producing quality material and/or effecting positive change in the world. Whenever I buy a Real Change newspaper, I give an extra dollar to the homeless street vendor who is selling it. Real Change is to my mind doing both the above-mentioned things.

Before concluding I must state the following:
1) I am not trying to place my books or blog on the same shelf as Real Change, nor compare my experience to that of a homeless street vendor. Check the paper out—it is truly high quality reporting.
2) I will continue to occasionally watch YouTube as long as they are free, especially the brilliant explanatory-lyrics take on "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
3) You are welcome to send me (or any member of my family) quality organic fair-trade dark chocolate, but please do not feed any to Hugo.

And now I want to share with you some pictures—for free!—sampled from the first third of my second book, "Late One Night." Enjoy!

On the earth

Which is another way of saying, grounded.

When asked in 2007 what the single most pressing environmental issue was, activist Julia Butterfly Hill replied, "The most pressing environmental issue is actually our disconnected consciousness." This from a woman who spent 738 consecutive days living in a redwood tree to keep it from being cut down. Similarly, towards the end of the recent movie "No Impact Man", author Colin Beavan seems to come to a similar conclusion. The biggest impact of our lives--that is, the least negative impact on the planet--will not come from how vigorously we recycle (Beavan makes the point that all recycling is "down-cycling", and to start with the "reduce" in "reduce, re-use, recycle"). It will come from now active we become in our communities, how connected we are with both the earth and with our fellow human beings.

As I write this I am siting outside, on the earth. I write with a pen on paper. All around me is desert, sun, dry heat, but I sit in the improbable shade of a cottonwood tree. A cool breeze dries the sweat from my face. A trail has led me here, up through sagebrush and prickly pear, showy mountain aster and sock-clinging cheatgrass, jackrabbit and grasshopper, here to a hidden canyon enclave of giant boulders and pools of dry sand and willow and cottonwood. I rest against one of the giant boulders and reflect on the life of one of the most grounded and community-entwined people I have ever known, my granddad.

From where I sit I can look down on Albuquerque, New Mexico. My mom says that when she was a little girl, Granddad's house was the last one on the edge of the desert. Their backyard was arroyos and horned toads leading straight to the Sandia Mountains into whose lap I've climbed. Now the development has reached the foothills, and in every other direction spreads unchecked by geography. The limiting factor is water.

Granddad was aware of--

--hold on. Stop. Breathe. Stay grounded. I myself am aware, sitting here reflecting, of wanting to say too much. Of trying in one breath to connect my granddad's life and awareness of the unsustainable water-based existence of Albuquerque in the desert, with his incredible life as one of the youngest men to work at Sandia National Laboratory on the development of the atomic bomb and his awareness of the civilization-altering implications of that, with his involvement with his family, church, and community, from the long, delightfully unhurried conversations we shared in his living room when I was a "grown-up" to the birthday and Christmas cards we received without fail to the way he kept in touch with old friends near and far right up until the end. And then to somehow connect all that with the redwoods and recycling and living in harmony with other living beings on the earth.

But what I really want to say is that I'll miss him.

I will miss him, and so will my brother and sister, and so will my mom, and so will a lot of people. We will miss him because he was a wise and kind and good person, and he was our granddaddy, our dad, our friend.

It is easy to lose sight, in writing and in life, of why we are here. Of why we do what we do, why we try to learn as much about the earth and about people and about living together on the earth as we can. We do it because of love. Granddad was very loved, and he loved the earth and he loved us very much. Soon his ashes will be back where in some metaphorical sense they started out, on the earth.

I will miss him.

An inconvenient truth

At 3AM I am woken by the singularly exasperating chirp of a dying smoke detector. It is a well-known but little-publicized fact that smoke detectors are programmed to wait until 3AM on that night you’ve been hoping to catch up on sleep before starting their death rattle, a precise sequence of incrementally more frequent bleeps. My impulse is to rip the thing from the ceiling, sever the wires, and smash the lot to bits with a hammer, as I did once—to no avail—in my college dorm room after the teakettle spontaneously combusted. Fortunately the love of my life (henceforth, LL) intervenes. After some fumbling about we are able to simply replace the battery.

Sleep is slow to return. My mind wanders to another inconvenience a few days prior. At the time I’d wanted to write about it but hadn’t. The smoke detector incident takes me back there.

At this point a warning is necessary.

WARNING: The following entry is about feelings.

It is Wednesday evening. LL and I are visiting a dear friend, an artist who in this lifetime has been touched by grace as well as sorrow. I met her after she had experienced the worst loss possible, that of a child. Having myself lost a sibling, we bonded almost instantly. Shortly thereafter, by her account, nine or so other people appeared in her life who shared with me the number 28, whether a birthday, anniversary, or other significant event. One of these friends had bought for her "The Idiot’s Guide to Numerology," and I pick it up now.

Mathematics, the science of numbers, fascinates me. Whether it is the Fibonacci sequence in the spiral of a sunflower or the repeating fractal designs at different scales of a coastline or the unflappability of pi, I’ve always been intrigued when numbers objectively illuminate a pattern. Numerology, the study of numbers’ occult meanings and their supposed influence on our lives, is different. Like astrology and the automobile, numerology elicits in me a delight wrapped up in disbelief: that is to say, I do not understand it.

This is the opposite of what I let on. As our artist friend talks about the "28-ers" in her life, I smile self-importantly at LL. I pat The Idiot’s Guide as if those of us associated with a 28 are part of a secret club that she can never be a part of, a club fully explained by this book, for those who need such explanation. I intend it all in good fun.

But as I touched on in my first blog, even good intentions can do harm when carried out without thought. And anything that highlights difference or separation cannot help invite comparison and judgment. X is better than Y. I am better than you. You are better than me.

We say goodnight to our friend. As LL and I talk on the way home, this is the first time I realize I've hurt her feelings. With my affected pomp and command of numerology, she felt bad, and now I feel bad for causing this. It is not easy to explore these feelings. It is so much easier to gloss over them. What an inconvenient truth that I am human, a sentient being, able to cause another pain and feel pain myself. But what profound gratitude seeps into my core as I realize that here is a fellow human willing to process through this discomfort with me! I begin to glimpse the meaning of those bumper stickers that say, "Peace in the world begins with peace in the home which begins with peace in the heart." Unlike the insane chirping of the dying smoke detector, this particular inconvenience becomes an opportunity for self-reflection.

Incidentally, the numbers in 10/3/2009 add up to 15, 1 + 5 = 6, and 6 "represents malfunctioning home appliances, overcast skies, and mindfulness."

Beginnings

Friday, September 25, 2009

"First do no harm." —Hippocrates? or not, see below
"It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable."
—Moliere

First do no harm.

That seems an appropriate start for a blog that will aim to be about healing the world. I have so many people to thank, so much gratitude to express for where I am today, it seems the least I could do is to avoid harm. Now here I sit, paralyzed, afraid to type the wrong word.

Already I’m wrong. Wikipedia informs me that Primum non nocere, "first do no harm," is not part of the Hippocratic Oath. It first appeared in the late 1800s with a few proposed first authors. Though principally applied to medicine, it has been used more broadly with time, particularly now in the beginning of the 21st century. Is this because more of us are viewing a world the way a doctor sees a patient, as someone needing help? In wanting to help, are we recognizing that not only are our good intentions insufficient, but at times can even do harm if carried out?

Yet we cannot let indecision leave us frozen like Han Solo in the second (or fifth!) Star Wars. By our inaction we condone the status quo. Hence, Moliere.

In preparation for this first blog I listen to George Kranz’s Din Da Da. Daemond Arrindell spoke of this song last night during a 20-minute prose reading. That is to say, he had been assigned to write and read aloud 20 minutes of original prose, but what came out was pure, soul-baring, edge-of-your-seat poetry. The man could stand up and read the wordless instructions to an Ikea kit and it would sound like gospel. Daemond made numerous references to music, hip-hop in particular, Din Da Da in almost reverent tones, and I am compelled to find and listen to it. I am not disappointed. In trying to avoid harmful words, it feels right to move-dance-shake to this seamless fusion of rhythm and chant, wordless as those Ikea instructions.

In preparation for this first blog I have become the luckiest person in the world. Six days ago I married the love of my life, and if that sounds cotton-candy sweet, it is. It is the most wonderful thing I could imagine and more. Starting this life together—together starting this life—makes me aware of the family and friends who give our lives meaning, joy, possibility. At the risk of saying too little, for no words could ever be adequate, I must give thanks to all who have touched my life, and to mi corazón, mi vida, mi media aguacate.

In preparation for this first blog I was born, and for all that I am I thank my parents.

So why am I here?

To begin.

For so long I have been making my way towards this, and now it is time: to start, with what Patch Adams calls "seasoned optimism," a conversation. With you. About first doing no harm, and since that goal is ultimately impossible if one is alive, about the actions and inactions that each of us take while here on this planet for the time we have. About living with intention. With that let me begin.

love,
Ned