On my way home now from Phoenix, from a gathering that was remarkable on many levels. It will continue to resonate for months and years to come. Truly, it was a lifetime kind of experience.
One small note: in the shuttle on the way to the airport a few of us were talking about what will happen when the world truly starts to unshrink. When airline travel becomes prohibitive and fuel costs make transporting goods too expensive, the world will begin to unshrink, find its real size again. And in that moment, I had a strong image of the world uncrumpling and in the folds and cracks, new local creativity, food, sustenance, culture and life will unfold.
It makes sense to take a stand for a place now. To have a place where you can contribute to the local resources and the local life.
I’m tired and happy, and loving going home.
A great quote from a fun article on knuckleballers:
“Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor’s mailbox” – Willie Stargill.
Robert Paterson is musing about The Power of One. Seems his website will record 1,000,000 hits this summer. When he started blogging he had no idea that within five years, a million people would have hit the site.
So I posted a question in his comments, and I extend it to you. If you knew that in five years 1 million people would read what you have written, what would you do with that opportunity?
It might come as a surprise to some, but greatness is not predetermined. Great ideas do not emerge fully hatched, marketable and readily consumed by the ,ultitudes. They start as small thoughts, little experiements, testing the waters. Who knows whether the blog post you write today will lead to millions of readers checking in with you. You have an unprecedented historical opportunity to send a message to all those minds and hearts.
What would you want to say?
The situation in Zimbabwe being what it is, it’s often hard to see beyond the headlines and the punditry that tells how how we should feel. But of course, in this connected world, we live in a field of relationships that descends deep into every story on our planet.
I have friends in Zimbabwe, and from that network of hosts and courageous leaders comes this email:
Standing in Silence under a New Moon
Sunday 6th April 20087 days ago we voted for change in our country.
Against the legal imperative to call an election foul within 48 hours of final polling
and to publish the numbers within 6 days,
and in the face of SADAC and international observers approval of our voting process,
ZanuPF is now demanding a recount.What possible reason can there be for this delay
other than a refusal to accept the deafening call
for the old man to leave.The threats violence have once again begun
Yesterday white farms were attacked by ZanuPF youths in Masvingo
Journalists have been arrested at the airportWe are weary and battle scarred
fearful and courageous
carrying the shadows of pain and intimidation on our souls
we have spoken,
done all we can by peaceful means
still held in the dark unknowing.We live with the politics of fear
Learning to hold the ground
I’m learning to hold ground too, with them from afar.
The Westin Hotel in Atlanta, which lost windows in last week’s tornado.
A strange week indeed. I left home yesterday morning bound for Toronto and then on to Atlanta where I am doing some work with Public Radio Capital and Native Public Media, looking at how Native community radio stations make an impact. Yesterday I made it as far as Toronto, but a flight delay meant I was cutting my connection close, and I still had to apply for a work visa at US Customs and Border Protection. I arrived in secondary screening at 10 to eight, with an 830 flight pending. There was no one else in the room, save a distraught Hispanic woman who was being denied entry and a tired Chinese man, waiting for his visa too. I have applied for four of these TN visas and it’s not an onerous process. All three officers however remarked on my short time, and I patiently explained to them that my flight was delayed, I was doing my best and could they try and get me on the 830 flight to Atlanta.
But alas, US Customs and Border Patrol is not about customer service. It is very much about creating an environment that seeks to put you off your game, get you to tip your hand, spill the beans. Officers stay out of rapport, breaking eye contact should you try to engage, and in secondary screening, they move very slowly, laughing and talking loudly about clearly non-related stuff. It seems designed to put you on the defensive. They’re cool…what’s bugging you? So alas at 830, after sitting alone in the customs hall with five officers trading stories, an officer finally called me forward, asked a few questions and gave me my visa. By then the plane had gone and I was bound for a night in Toronto. There was no apology to be had. But I don’t complain – that is their job: to screen anyone entering the United States and ensure that no immigration laws are broken. That is how things are with Homeland Security. For me it’s just good practice in patience.
As for Air Canada, they were good enough to recognize their part in the timing delay and they nicely put me up at the Sheraton right at the airport. So props to them.
Luckily my connection was non-essential, and so I rebooked for this morning, and shot down here on a quick CRJ flight, arriving at noon, which was too early for this Shearton, so, stranded again, I set out around downtown Atlanta searching for life. It was long before I discovered that life, even on this lovely cool spring day, was all underground, in the Peachtree Center mall, where long lines of office workers were queued up at fast food outlets for lunch. I found some decent pad thai (Atlanta is a very multicultural city, despite your prejudices about what Georgia must be like) and settled into read the Globe and Mail. In the Life section I read this quote by the poet James Richardson, which sums up my week:
The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.
Sweet. And so with that, I headed back out into the downtown core and shot some photos of the buildings, and especially the Westin Hotel which lost a whole lot of windows in a tornado last week. Tomorrow I run a two hour world cafe on measuring the impact of Native community radio stations, then I hop an afternoon flight to Toronto and on to Vancouver so that I can arise bright and early Thursday for the first day of two with the Department of Fisheries and Ocieans. I finish that job on Friday at noon, debrief, hit a 5pm flight to Nanaimo and head up to Parksville to run a weekend retreat for the Vancouver Aboriginal Transformative Justice Service until Sunday at noon. Then I’m home, and staying there for about two weeks. That will be the longest stint at home this year, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to play with my kids and tend our new garden.
If I didn’t have flow, and if I didn’t see travel and work like this as one long extended meditation, I don’t know how I’d survive it.