Here is an interview with Michael Franti. What an inspiring human being he is!

This whole deal of “allowing” seems passive. There is an awfully lot of work that needs done in the world. What is this allowing thing, anyway? It’s true, I do get caught in reflective cycles which seem to keep coming back on themselves not going anywhere. But I have also spent a lot of energy on physically active pursuits which have seemingly dead ended with little positive result. Somehow I want to be in touch with a bigger picture so that the things that I choose to do result in helping me to get where I want to go. Like looking at the map before I begin my travels.

It ’s so easy to feel lost. The world can feel so big and lonely. So here I am. What do I want to do? I want to be helpful. How do I begin to be helpful? Well, this room could use picking up. My office is a mess. My business is not really going in the direction I want it to. I have not fully taken responsibility for it. I still consider it a cast off and I associate it with things that I don’t want to think about. But here it is. And it has been a great gift to me. This business has been used as an instrument for healing. Maybe if I look at it in a new way and put some positive energy into it, it may flourish.

I can’t go into it much here because it’s a part of my personal life that I don’t feel comfortable revealing here. Maybe someday I will. But in the meantime, maybe the specifics don’t matter much in this context. I bet most of us have something in our life that we cast aside as not worth going into. Sometimes those are the areas that really should be delved into.

So I begin with my office. Maybe the beginning of my creating a “save the world” campaign should begin with me picking up the mail off of my office floor. Maybe I should spend the day with my kids when I am done. Maybe I should go and visit my neighbors who had a recent tragedy. This is the material of my day. And it is the beginnings of my map.

And it doesn’t have to feel aimless. It is a part of the big picture of all of us, each of us going about our day, doing whatever our business is, doing the best we each can with our own lives, our own families, our own business. And we do interconnect. And we do affect each other. And if we have hope, those interconnections can feel positive. We can feel lifted when we go to the grocery store and smile at the person in front of us in line, or wave to the person who let us into traffic as we head home.

So what does this all have to do with global warming, potential war, terrorism, all of the frightening things going on in the world? What does this have to do with the financial crisis? Everything. We make up the material of our society. It may feel like there is no connection, but it is all just a matter of scale. Imagine the difference it would make if a significant percentage of all of us simply began to spend less time watching the television and instead visit neighbors with our kids, or just take a walk around our neighborhood to become aware of the people who live near us. I think that those first steps are the most important and form the base for the beginnings of empathy and understanding. War is just a lack of understanding on a larger scale. Terrorism is a desperate grab for power used by those who feel marginalized. Economics begin with our interrelationships and systems of helping each other through our lives.

I know this is simplistic. I know that when you get into the details of actually doing, it is not as easy as it sounds. But I think that many of us feel so disempowered by the scale of what needs to be done, that we do not even begin. Somehow we need to work together. Somehow we need to begin to change that which needs to change and we each need to begin with our own house, our own neighborhood, our own office.

So I pull the mail into a stack on my floor and pick up the top letter and open it. And the next, and the next. Tomorrow, I’ll do a few more. Maybe my friends will come over and help me. I bet they would have some great ideas. Maybe they need help with their stack. I would certainly be willing to help.

People are already solving carbon footprint problems, community problems and economy problems through grassroots organizations and businesses. Check it out! I got these videos from Green For All.

“Omar Freilla and members of the Green Worker Cooperatives talk about their work to saturate the South Bronx, with worker-owned green businesses.”

” Orrin Williams and the folks at Growing Home demonstrate how urban agriculture is reconnecting people to their communities and the earth, and revitalizing Chicago.”

” Aundre Collins talks about his work with Solar Richmond, and how it has shaped his life.”

Here is a great vision.

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Here is an excerpt from the web site for this organization explaining what the number 350 is all about.

“Where did this 350 number come from?

Dr. James Hansen, of NASA, the United States’ space agency, has been researching global warming longer than just about anyone else. He was the first to publicly testify before the U.S. Congress, in June of 1988, that global warming was real. He and his colleagues have used both real-world observation, computer simulation, and mountains of data about ancient climates to calculate what constitutes dangerous quantities of carbon in the atmosphere. The Bush Administration has tried to keep Hansen and his team from speaking publicly, but their analysis has been widely praised by other scientists, and by experts like Nobel Prize winner Al Gore. The full text of James Hansen’s paper about 350 can be found here.”

Check the main site out also: 350.org.

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Several months ago I was running. I was walking my dog. We had just crossed the bridge and crossed over to the right side of the road towards the pond closest to the road. I was so happy. Dakota and I were running together and I felt so strong and so free and the happiness seemed to be fueling my run into flight. I was proud of my ability to keep up with my running dog. The air streamed back across my face and the rest of me and I felt sure that I could fly. In preparation for take off my body was beginning to lean forward and my legs were not keeping up with my head and shoulders which were leading me. I fell forward with great momentum and as my left hand let go of the leash I jammed my left thumb hard against the ground back towards my wrist.

It hurt, but not that much. I cried out a little and laughed too. I picked up the leash in the other hand and continued on my way around the pond to go and see my friend. My thumb swelled up some. I took care of it for a couple of days and then figured it would take care of itself. I stopped playing the guitar for a little while but then started up again. I could play, as long as I was gentle in my use of the hand. It did not continue to resolve itself. I let my friend who is a masseur at Kim’s Healing Center look at it and pull it back into place. It seemed to be a little out of joint. He did pull it back into place, but a couple of days later after playing guitar some more, it went back out of joint again.

I guess I don’t need to recount all of these details. The fact is, after almost three months, this thumb still has not healed the way I hoped. I have gotten advice and followed it. Part of what I have needed to do is to stop playing the guitar while it heals. I had gone for nearly two months without playing the guitar when two days ago I decided I just had to pick it up and since then I have been paying the price again.

It seems to me that my story is an allegory for me. I find that more and more I can look at my life and see patterns and I interpret meanings from those patterns.

In my wonderful happy run, I got ahead of myself. I leaned far forward with my head and even my heart and my feet left the ground. I thought that I could fly. I thought that if I believed with great intensity, the world would lift me with my vision. But in this case, it wasn’t really vision. It was heart and desire. But my feet apparently still have to stay on the ground if I am to avoid a fall.

I have let you all know a little bit about how a couple of years ago, maybe more at this point, I had held back on myself for so long that it felt like either I was going to let myself sink and die, or I was going to let go and allow. So I let go. I let go to a very large degree. I let go of so many boundaries and definitions that I had felt imprisoning me that it took me a while to catch my bearings. Actually, I think I am still catching my bearings. I love the freedom that I have felt. I love the vibrancy. I love expressing without fear. But I went from being in a curled up ball to curling back into as wide an embrace of reality as I could muster. My spine is not bent forward like an old woman. I have a tendency instead to lean back. I have a tendency to look upward all the time. Even when I meditate, my head tends to bend back and upward. It is like I want to understand the sky.

When I begin my qigong active exercises I remember the cues that Chunyi Lin gives about how to stand. One of the things that he says almost every time in every exercise or meditation is to tuck the chin downward just slightly to keep the whole spine straight. The strongest and most natural state for the spine is to be straight. The spine is the energy channel which is most basic. My spine is still not straight. I have gone from one extreme to the other.

I look up like I want to understand the sky. But it is more powerful, perhaps, to straighten my spine so that I can see what is directly in front of me. It is called having a level head. I guess that phrase has a literal meaning for me.

Dakota, my model in flight:

When I was little and I was riding in the car with my family, someone would see something and point to it outside of the car. I would look for it and often miss whatever was being pointed to before we had passed it. It became frustrating. I guess it was understandable. After all, I was the youngest. I might have been sitting lower in the car, or some other factor may have made it less likely for me to see whatever was going by. Over time, I think I gave up on trying.

As I grew up I began to rely upon other people’s points of view to see. I would go to other people to tell me what they thought, or I would go to a book to give me the truth of a thing. I had little confidence in my own vision. And I think the physical use of the eyes is just a more basic level of a use of the eyes that involves a higher use of the brain and spirit: vision, the ability to look forward and look with courage, foresight. . . and those are certainly related to discernment and wisdom.

It has been time for many reasons in my life for me to begin to use my own eyes to see. It is frightening. I don’t always want to see the truth. Just look at the entry I posted just a couple of days ago. Life can be very frightening. But I can choose to see, and then vision where I want to go and what I want to do, or I can ride along passively with the wave that I am already on.

Yesterday I was at a meeting with some of the people at the Alliance for Sustainable Communities. We were discussing the issue of mobilizing people towards change. One of the people said something then that really touched a chord for me. People aren’t going to go forward into a void. They need a vision of where they are going before they are going to leave an old paradigm, an old belief system about the way things need to be. Yes, it does look pretty bleak in our world today. The problems are so multifaceted and interconnected it seems like a straitjacket that we can’t get out of. But answers are blooming at the same time all around us. Why haven’t I even thought about that?

OK. The economy has some major flaws. There may come a time when we can’t rely upon the banks. Maybe the grocery stores may reach a point where they don’t have the ability to bring food to us from far away. Maybe many of us will be losing our jobs. Maybe gasoline may become too expensive. Maybe oil for heating our homes may become too expensive.

The political arena has had some real challenges for a long time. There has been so much corruption for so long, once you get into that system it seems that making changes becomes a continuous give and take of compromise where one hand is supposed to wash the other even though it should be so clear what is right and what is wrong.

The corporate world has been aiming at shareholder profits to the exclusion of everything else since that word “corporation” was first defined. We are seeing the results of that in the narrow focus on selling, selling selling and the ultimate use of the media to hypnotize our culture into buying buying and buying bigger and more.

We each have answers. If we can learn to work together, we can put those answers together into a cohesive whole. It is too multifaceted for any one of us. That is why the answer lies in working together. We can re-create our economy, from the bottom up if necessary. There already exist cooperative banks. There are organizations that are active here in the Lehigh Valley which bring together local businesses who can and do attempt to support each other. There is a group involved in trying to get local farmers together with those who would buy food from them here in the Valley, restaurants, the local food coop which is forming, and other organizations as well. There are people in this area involved in farming which is not so dependent upon the use of pesticides and fossil fuels in other forms. There are many organizations through which people are coming together to solve all of these problems and others. We just need to get over our fears and reach out. And add to the visioning.

There is hope. There really is. Thank you all for helping me to have the courage to see. Please feel free to let me know what you think the answers are.