To new beginnings....

June 25, 2010

Change. A time and place where a feeling of unease meets excitement. A period in one's life that requires a choice, a decision to be made. A time and place in my life as of now.

The continuous rock in my life is gone. The person who is forever dependable, always reliable, and forever grateful for who I am as a person and a friend. Gone to the land of palms, lizards, and Latinos. Gone to create change in her world, therefore creating a parallel change in mine. In reality, she's still here, always will be. However, as I age, I am coming to appreciate the value of dates, gatherings, and the company of best friends. I'm coming to realize that technology, while an amazing development, does not make up for the time and distance between two people as close as she and I. I said, "Call anytime. Text. Facebook. Whatever." But, is that enough? Will it be enough? Will cellphones and Facebook suffice at a time when one of us so desperately needs the other? Tears cloud my vision as I step out of her car and into the airport, as I board the plane, as I write this note. Tears at a time and place where unease meets excitement. Excitement for the new life awaiting her arrival. Excitement for her change.

Personal change. Leaving behind the dance world that has been a home, a constant companion of mine for nearly my entire life. Heading into the world of the unknown. A world of change. In career, in location, in habits, schedules, friends; everything I've so comfortably been surrounded by since my return from the West. The present marks a new stage in my life. A developmental stage that will take me from student to teacher, friend to mentor, lover to companion. A stage that has yet to acquire a time or a place. Where I will live, where I will work, where my soul will find peace, and where my love will land is yet to be determined. These are frightening thoughts. But, this unease is met with excitement, because this is change.

As stated by the fabulous Eleanor Roosevelt, "The future belongs to those who believe in the power of their dreams." Kim is chasing the dream that I first learned of at the age of 12. Her future belongs to her. And, while I am faced with an uncertain future, I know that whatever it brings will belong to me. Simply because I believe in my dreams.

Lost in Love.

It’s like a dream

in which

it seems

your world is spinning

faster, faster.

The force within

grabs hold

and blankets you

together.

Lost in love,

you beg

to never let go.

Pure desire.

Hearts race faster.

The sight,

the smell,

the sound,

the taste.

Fingers intertwine,

face-to-face.

Lost in love,

you beg

to never let go.

Thoughts race

of forever together.

Two worlds collide,

joining as one.

Shooting stars

within your heart,

all because they opened it.

Lost in love,

you beg,

you beg,

you beg,

to never let go.

Motivation for your soul.

January 11, 2010

This post comes at a time when doubts, depression, and dissidence is consuming the very society of which we are a part. No longer are we spectators, sitting back and observing those "savages" in faraway lands. We are witnessing death and destruction in our own backyards, and now, as young adults carrying the responsibility of curing the ills of our planet, we must act immediately. If this speech doesn't inspire you to do so, I'm not sure that anything will.

Healing or Stealing

... you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

**This was an exceptionally inspiring commencement address given by Paul Hawken at the University of Portland, 2009.

31 Days of Giving

Even the poorest of the poor can afford to partake in at least one of these selfless acts.

1. Help get PJs to kids in shelters so they won't have to sleep in their clothes by giving just $10 at pajamaprogram.org.

2. Mentor a struggling student online at icouldbe.org. Studies suggest that a little boost can double a kid's chance of going to college.

3. Donate books you've already read to your library. Most public libraries accept them.

4. End homelessness through soccer. $10 to streetsoccerusa.org helps a homeless person meet challenges on and off the field.

5. Fight malnutrition. A $1 gift to vitaminangels.org will provide much-needed vitamin supplements to children in places like Honduras, Haiti, and even poor areas in the U.S.

6. Tend a garden. $5 to dinnergarden.org buys seeds for enough veggies to feed a struggling family of seven.

7. Do some pro bono work. Whether you're in marketing or IT, taprootfoundation.org can match you with a non-profit in your community that needs your skills.

8. Get lifesaving malaria medication to 10 children by donating $25 to savethechildren.org.

9. Click and give... At care2.org, every click you make prompts a sponsor to make a donation that will fight breast cancer, global warming, and more.

10. ....or surf and give. Use GoodSearch to find what you're looking for online, and every search will send money to a cause of your choice.

11. Regift. Turn gift cards you'll never use into donations to your favorite charity at plasticjungle.com.

12. Provide solar power. $50 to goodgifts.org will send an African village a solar lamp, stove and water heater.

13. Prevent disease. A $50 donation will allow doctorswithoutborders.org to vaccinate 50 people against meningitis, polio and other life-threatening diseases.

14. Send a free holiday card to a soldier abroad via redcross.org/email/saf.

15. Have a potluck with your friends instead of going out for dinner - give the $35 you save to strength.org to feed a child for a month.

16. Keep someone's lights on. Even $5 at smallcanbebig.org makes a difference to a family who needs help with bills due to illness, domestic violence or other tragedies.

17. Inspire a leader. A donation to the Binti Pamoja Center (their name means "daughters united" in Swahili) helps a girl in a Kenyan slum pay for school and learn how to be a community leader.

18. Keep girls on the team. Giving to Robin Roberts' GoGirlGo! Fund (at womenssportsfoundation.org) will help girls displaced by Hurricane Katrina stay in sports.

19. Help those helping others. $150 to homebasedcarealliance.org will supply medicine plus sterile gloves and a bicycle to a caregiver for people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

20. Reach out to the new kid. $35 buys a winter coat for a resettled refugee in the U.S. at theirc.org.

21. Feed four children in Tanzania a healthy breakfast for just $1 at gocampaign.org, a nonprofit run with the help of kids from the U.S.

22. Warm toes. $5 to hannahssocks.org buys seven pairs for a homeless person.

23. Play trivia. At freekibble.com, every answer - right or wrong - sends 10 pieces of dog food to an animal shelter in need.

24. Help women recover after childbirth. Fistulafoundation.org helps train doctors to care for the 2 to 3 million women who have injuries from prolonged or obstructed labor.

25. Stock a refrigerator. Just $1 to feedingamerica.org will provide nine pounds of groceries to a hungry family in the U.S.

26. Knit. Send squares to warmupamerica.org; they'll be made into afghans and given to battered women's shelters.

27. Give peace to survivors of sexual trauma. $47 to the International Medical Corps (imcworldwide.org) delivers medical and mental health care to refugees who have suffered sexual violence.

28. Turn your wedding into a charitable event. At idofoundation.org, you can link your registry to your favorite cause. Each purchase triggers a donation from the retailer.

29. Starve a landfill. Make this a "no wrapping paper" year - use newspapers, even the pages of this magazine, instead.

30. Keep a woman safe. At madre.org, $30 buys a cell phone for a rural Afghan woman; if threatened with violence, she can make a lifesaving call.

31. Give the gift of opportunity. At worldvisionmicro.org, you can make a microloan to help a woman in a developing country get her own small business up and running.

Where My Heart Lies

"This is the land of the Big Deal, of pay or play, of millions one year and bankruptcy the next, of meetings, meetings, meetings (interrupted by an occasional movie), of much talk and very little action, of hustle and hassle, greed and guile."

And this is the land where my heart lies.

Fleeting Memories

November 26, 2009

Fleeting memories in a dream

A world of restless slumber

Darkness consumes my every breath

Around it wraps its deathly grip

Bony fingers in the dead of night

Squeezing

Holding

Tighter and tighter

Screams escape my mouth

Muffled by suffocation

Tears blind

Flesh bruised

Toss and turn and thrash

Tormented and bewildered

Open my eyes to realize

The hallucination has escaped

Struggle to shake it

The torturous feeling

Of death’s untimely grip

Sleep beckons once again

Fleeting memories in a dream

A world of peaceful slumber.

Oh, my sweet Darfur. Is it all "over?"

9/01/09

The departing Force Commander of UNAMID (United Nations - African Union Mission in Darfur), General Martin Luther Agwai, has been widely quoted as saying so. And if “over” is taken to mean the end of large-scale clashes between heavily armed forces, then this statement is true. In his view, the problems are now essentially related to “security issues… banditry, localised issues, people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local level. But real war as such, I think we are over that”.

Is this assessment substantially new?

Not necessarily. In the most recent July 13, 2009 Report of the Secretary-General on the deployment of the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur, UNSG Ban Ki-moon also noted the reduced levels of force on force violence:

During June 2009, there was a decline in the reported levels of violence in Western Darfur, although the armed parties along the Chad-Sudan border remained on high alert… following attacks by the Justice and Equality Movement on positions near Umm Baru (Northern Darfur) in mid-May 2009, there have been no significant military operations, although Sudanese Armed Forces have maintained an increased presence and military patrolling activities in the areas of Umm Baru, Kornoi and Tine, Northern Darfur… large-scale violence stretching over a wide territory and for lengthy periods is now infrequent.

This reported reduction in fighting, should it last, can only be welcomed by those interested in seeing a possible breathing space open for some form of eventual negotiated peace.

But does that mean that Darfur, as the problems there are popularly understood, is “over”? Certainly not.

The same July 2009 report by the UNSG states clearly and unambiguously: “the situation for the civilians of Darfur continues to be deeply troubling, with 2.6 million internally displaced persons (IDP) unable to return to their homes and some 4.7 million Darfurians in need of assistance. Meanwhile, banditry and sexual violence continue to plague civilians throughout Darfur.”

The assessment of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is just as worrisome:

Conflict and the displacement of civilians within Darfur, and to Chad, continue to hamper efforts to protect and assist the region’s 2.5 million IDPs, as well as some 45,000 Chadian refugees and more than 3,000 refugees from the Central African Republic. The joint African Union and United Nations hybrid force (UNAMID) is present but unable to carry out all its responsibilities due to a lack of equipment and personnel… in Darfur, besides insecurity, violence against women and environmental degradation, the primary concerns of people are in access to land and other livelihood opportunities. Migration heightens rivalries over natural resources, and competition for water, firewood and grazing land can lead to conflict.

In other words, while fighting may be down currently, the underlying issues which lie at its root have yet to be addressed or resolved and the humanitarian consequences of this remains unabated. Coupled with the very serious challenges surrounding the Comprehensive Peace Agreement which has led to a Government of National Unity after many years of North/South conflict, the UNHCR assessment remains all too true today: “The conflict in Sudan continues to affect millions of people and create a complex and volatile political and security situation that remains a challenge for the humanitarian community”.

Similarly unresolved, despite the current lull in major combat, are the very important issues surrounding impunity and the International Criminal Court indictments. Amnesty International has repeatedly called for cooperation on the indictments, which concern President Bashir and others, while rejecting the smoke screen neo-colonialist argument attempting to delegitimize the ICC:

Africa played a leading – indeed, decisive - role in 1998 in the establishment of the ICC. Thirty African states have so far ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. African states strongly supported the creation of the ICC as a court of last resort to ensure that African victims of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes receive justice and reparations whenever states were unable and unwilling to investigate and prosecute such crimes. Three African states, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, referred situations in their own countries to the ICC on such a basis. A fourth country, Côte d’Ivoire, has recognized the ICC’s jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute crimes in its territory or by its citizens abroad.

Until a real and lasting peace is negotiated which confronts the underlying conditions which have led to six years of war, allowing for the safe return of refugees and the internally displaced and including safeguards marking an end to impunity and a respect for the legitimate ICC process, it is not - and cannot be - “over” in Darfur.