the story of stuff

16 April 2008 at 6:04 am (Uncategorized)
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Last night I saw a great short film called the story of stuff. Why was it great?  It was creative, succinct, and informative (in the deepest sense of the word). Annie Leonard the creator basically talks for twenty minutes while wiggly-line sketches move around behind her.  What I think Annie does so well is make everthing connect and hang together so that you are not thrown a bunch of disconnected bullet-pointed factoids. She tells the story of stuff.  Have you ever stopped and wondered where your phone came from (probably several places on many continents) and where it will go once it breaks and you throw it “away” (by the way is there really such-a-thing as “away” — maybe we should say ”away from me” and “towards someone else”)?  Well I don’t want to say to much before you watch the film — which, by the way, you can watch for free online at www.storyofstuff.com.  After you watch it please post a comment and let me know what you think. 

 

  

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Connecting Face and Food

5 April 2008 at 2:45 pm (Uncategorized)
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Just this morning my daughter and I were having french toast and we scraped the bottom of our large honey jar. gone…….. Ding! Then it occured to me today was the first day of the farmers market this year!  Later this morning I zipped down the hill on my bike the nine blocks to our downtown market.  It was packed out for early April.  Jugglers, banjo and mandolin players,  a tall orange creature on stilts.  But the best part was seeing the familiar faces of where I buy my honey (Bill) and soap (Suzanna) and coffee (Dana) and produce (Gretchen). There are many reasons to buy local food. Garlic traveling 20 miles vs. 1500 miles conserves a load of oil.  And It’s fresher so it tastes better. But one reason that I find very fascinating is that when I buy my garlic from Gretchen I am reconnecting face and food.  Somewhere along our nation’s recent history we’ve decided it’s not really important to do that. We’ve abstracted and separated our food from it’s sources.

It’s an especially potent idea for me right now because I just became an uncle.  Yesterday, my daughter and I went over to babysit so that my sister and her husband could get out and run some errands.  As I was feeding Hugo his mommy’s milk from a bottle and he was gazing into my eyes, I remembered learning that a newborn’s focal length is exactly the distance from the mother’s breast to her eyes.  Face connected to food! We had it at the start.  What makes us think we can afford to loose it?

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take Many doses of play and don’t call me in the morning

19 March 2008 at 11:33 am (Uncategorized)
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As a father of a five-year old I have thought a good deal about how I want to raise my daughter.  What formative experiences do I want her to have? Who do I hope she will become / is becoming?  The metaphor that comes to mind when I think about the first few years of life is a house.  Interactions that my daughter and I have now are much more formative than ones that we will have when she is 32. Now we’re building the foundation; the rest of life is detail and trim.

In our day and age this desire to be intentional about the formation of our children often translates to involvement in several extra-cirricular activities and  organized sports.  Our lives as adults are also busier and lived at a faster pace than generations that came before us.  So what suffers? True “free time”. Time for children (and adults) to make up stories and act them out; to make up games and play them. I still have some great memories of my sister and I making up games in our front yard, using whatever sports equipment and other props that we could find. So is it just my nostalgic longing for kids to have what I had?

Well, my friend Carrie, who is an Oregonian, and a very intentional, creative and thoughtful parent recently sent me an NPR article that I found interesting (“Creative Play Makes for Kids in Control” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=76838288 3/14/2008 ).  One of things they discuss is how “freewheeling imaginative play”, while seemingly unproductive to our hyper-schedule sensabilities, develops something in the brain called executive function. 

Executive function has a number of elements, such as working memory and cognitive flexibility. But perhaps the most important is self-regulation — the ability for kids to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulse, and exert self-control and discipline. Executive function — and its self-regulation element — is important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child’s IQ.

Our natural impulses to play imaginatively with whatever we can get our hands on (before becoming co-opted by ‘you-must-buy-in-order-to-play’ thinking) is an essential building block in becoming a healthy adult.  So even without the research, what we do naturally is good for us — more than we knew.

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‘in drag as champions of freedom’

1 March 2008 at 4:14 pm (Uncategorized)
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(*title of the blog is from bruce cockburn’s song “call it democracy”. it keeps ringing truer over the years.)

Last night i saw a film at the bellingham human rights film festival called “The Big Sellout”. It showed the human effects of privitization of health care, water, electricity encouraged by the World Bank and IMF.

Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and now a critic of their practices, compares modern warfare to modern economic practices. When we drop of bomb from 50,000 feet we don’t see the human faces. The same with economic policies. When they are conceived and put into practice from a distance the lives of the local people only show up as numbers and graphs.

One particular country of focus was Bolivia. From the film’s website

( www.thebigsellout.org )

“The 45 year old machinist and union activist [Oscar Olivera] led the people of Cochabamba to the streets in the year 2000, when the government of Bolivia, after being put under pressure by the World Bank, privatised the water of the third biggest city of the country. The water concession was given to the US-corporation Bechtel. In the course of the people‘s protest in Cochabamba tens of thousands of people hit the streets. They simply didn’t want to accept to pay up to a third of their income for their drinking water to the corporation. The government deployed police forces and later the military. The struggle that developed out of this became known as ‘the water war’.”Another story was of a phillipino woman, Minda, who was trying to get dialysis treatments for her son. On scene stuck in my mind. Her pulling one of those ‘take a number’ paper tabs in the hospital waiting room.

i wrote this poem in response:

RUNG OUT

take a number

it’s the wave of the future

we’ll sell the rain to you

at bargain prices that will drain you dry

*

excuse me sir

but you cannot catch the rain

in your hands to drink

if you do, make sure to weigh it first

you see, we need a number

*

see the lady dancing in the rain

we’ll strip her down

ring her clothes out

and charge her for that stolen water

*

or we may not.

it would be more efficient if

we just squeezed the water

right out of her soul.

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I used to know

30 January 2008 at 11:53 am (Uncategorized)
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A few years back while I was studying at Regent College in Vancouver, BC, I was tutoring high school students in Mathematics. One particular girl had just moved to Canada and she had to catch up. So we met twice a week for tutoring at first. After the first couple times we met I began to realize that she was making simple arithmetic mistakes. As a freshman in high school she did not know her times tables.

She said, “Well I used to know them in 5th grade.”

I asked the obvious question: “So what happened?”

She held up her calculator.

The prophetic words of Wendell Berry and Neil Postman came to mind. We were given mysterious, wonderful, complex and beautiful abilities. When we defer these abilities to the machine those ‘muscles’ atrophy, forget, decay.

The other day I was pondering what may happen with the proliferation of GPS systems in cars. Picture this:

A couple is on vacation and their GPS system breaks down. Thankfully they were just watching an old movie on their cell phone that showed someone pulling into a gas station to ask for directions. There was a station across the street. They walked up to the counter and asked the owner if he could beam over a map onto their blackberry.

‘Excuse me? What is it your looking for?’

“Well, we are trying to get to Los Angeles?”

The owner pulls out a paper map and begins to point the way, describing landmarks to look for on the way. “Oh, and there’s a great pie shop right at this junction. And don’t stop at the service station down the road from there. He dilutes his gas.”

The owner looks up at the couple who are thouroughly confused. He describes the whole route again to them, but they still look lost. “Do you want to write it down?” He hands them a pen and paper. But they now seem even more distraught.

“Here. Just take my map.”

“I used to know how to read maps back in 5th grade.”

“Well what happened?”

He holds up his now-broken blackberry.

“Can you call us a taxi??”

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See time new

28 January 2008 at 1:15 pm (Uncategorized)
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time as boxes or lines is a game

that i’m tired of playing.

i’m going to go home tonight

take my clock off the wall

reach down through the sleeve of time

grab the cuff and pull it through

and see what i discover.

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you pick: cancer or the lottery

22 January 2008 at 1:03 pm (Uncategorized)
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The more money we have will make us happier right? Well… not so much. The way our culture worships celebrities and drools over those who ‘have it all’ would lead us to believe that more money is what we need.  I was reminded a couple of days ago of the importance of questioning this powerful assumption.  I was talking with a guy I know named Jim at a homemade brew tasting and he mentioned hearing this study once that asked two groups of people how happy they were. (I’m not exactly sure what kind of happimeter they used). They first group was lottery winners one year after they hit the jackpot. The second group were people who had been diagnosed with cancer one year prior.  Which group do you think was a happier bunch? Some people might call this a ‘no-brainer’. But that’s why this is interesting.  It was actually those with cancer who were considerably happier than the jackpot winners.  

Jim’s thoughts on this (that I jive with too) is that when you are diagnosed with cancer your life comes into sharp focus.  All peripheral, unsatisfactory things fall by the wayside. You spend quality time with people you love and have the conversations that you’ve been wanting to have. You win the jackpot and all of a sudden your life becomes more complicated. More frills and peripheral doo-dads crowd your life. And more time is spent on the phone with frustrating automated menus and customer service people who ‘value you’ (read ‘want your money’).

Last Spring I read a superb book by a favorite author of mine (Bill McKibben) called Deep Economy.  He explores the assumption that more is better. He says, to be sure, that many millions of people in the world need more. A rise in their standard of living, or even a microloan would do wonders to dramatically improve their lives.  And that was also true for many of our ancestors.  However, we are at a point where that assumption breaks down. There is a point where more is NOT better.  In fact More takes us as individuals and communities — and as a planet — on a shiny path that in the end is unsatisfactory and destructive.

McKibben talks about the importance of and the vitality found in supporting our local communities — local food, local music, local hardware stores…..  When we support local businesses and farms we not only decelerate our harm to the environment we also discover a more textured life in the meaningful connections we deeply need and yearn for. Our fragmented lives become reconnected and integrated.

 So, maybe we shouldn’t hold out hope to win the lottery some day.  And why wait for cancer to take time to re-orient our lives around deep meaning and purpose?

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Can slowness be a gift?

18 January 2008 at 12:38 pm (Uncategorized)
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A friend of mine recently sent me a book called ‘In Praise of Slowness: challenging the cult of speed’. by Carl Honore. I actually don’t know who it was who sent it, but I say it was a friend because they must know me and know that I have been pondering time, speed, slowness recently. *   *   * Societal phenomenon that are pervasive come to be normal and unnoticed. But just because this is so does not mean they are helpful or healthy or in line with how (if you asked your core self) you really want to live. I remember hearing about someone who drank about four sodas a day. Water didn’t appeal to them at all. Their system was used to that sweet mix of sodium benzoate and citric acid. But that doesn’t mean its good for them. As they cut back and then stopped drinking soda their taste for water returned. *   *   *  In the same way, we become used to the fast pace of life — eating fast, driving fast, talking fast, working fast. This pace is normal to us. But what is really going on? How is this speed impacting our bodies, minds, and spirits? And is it how we really want to live? Does fast living really deliver on all its promises? Can we choose a new way of Slowness? From the outside Slowness may sound as boring as drinking water does to a soda drinker. But if we were able to detox from the frantic pace, I believe we would receive Slowness as a gift and a gateway to a whole textured universe at our fingertips.

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