Monday, November 30, 2009

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!

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

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

Monday, November 16, 2009

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.

Monday, November 9, 2009

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!!!


Monday, November 2, 2009

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.