Thoughtful Siona shares a grace-filled evening in her graduate program, a practice called authentic movement:

I’ve never seen a dance more elegant, or more raw, or more true. It sounds like an overstatement, but the looks on the faces of this collection of persons were so peaceful, and so self-contained, and so utterly and blissfully alone; it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It sounds like an overstatement, but the intricacy of the movement, the way in which this collection of blinded individuals moved and circled around each other, looked like nothing less than brilliant choreography. I wanted to cry at how beautiful it all was.

I’ve been involved in “alternative” grad schools for twenty years, and Siona’s story slaps me gently (zen-style) in the face: look freshly at the raw, brilliant edges of human experience being explored in these spreading but still-fringe places. I am so grateful for this work.

The peppery pizza burned my tongue, and the tobacco smoke in the restaurant was unbearable. But I was happy after a brisk spring day taking the local buses across the Hungarian plain from Debrecen to Okoritofulpos, and a half mile walk to a short silent street of houses and fields called Rapolt. Here had been the shtetl where grandma Shoshanna, whom I had only met in dream, was born.

I felt certain that nothing remained from 1910. I had no language except an exchange of smiles with a tiny round woman, scarf and overalls and wrinkles, who emerged from her small house. There was time to walk to the large wild field and sing and lay offerings, and to sit at the side of the road, and then to walk back to the bus stop in the direction that Shoshanna had taken, westward, so many years ago.

The next day I sat quietly at the train station at Zahony, waiting to cross the border into the Ukraine. Four linked box cars without windows rolled to a stop, and were immediately assaulted by dozens of tiny round women stuffing huge boxes of paper goods into the cars. A tall man crammed ten mountain bikes into one corner. Yelling and pushing, teenagers built stacks of electronic goods along the walls and promptly sat on them. I found a narrow space next to the bikes and noticed that the man had a roll of $100 bills. I gave him a postcard, a view of San Francisco from the green flanks of Mt. Tamalpais, and told him this is where mountain bikes were born.

Less than 20 minutes later the train stopped and emptied in what was once the Soviet Union. With my passport I was escorted around the crowd to a border officer who was venomous but found no reason not to let me go. Sergei was the taxi driver and suddenly we were in his five speed Opel hurtling across the old roads, negotiating a fare in Spanish and smoking Ukrainian cigarettes while drag queen RuPaul’s disco hit “Raining Men” blasted out of his only cassette tape. The sun was setting deep red through the rear window.

I had a room in the fanciest hotel in Uzgorhod, where a guitarist played John Lennon’s “Imagine” and “Woman” during my dinner alone, and later at the elevator a woman in black stockings asked me if I liked the girls.

Sergei did not know why I was there until the next day when he drove me into the snowy hills to a lovely small city, Khust, and pulled into the parking lot of the high school to find the local English teacher. Olga rode with us and translated to him that my grandfather Sandor Klein and great-grandmother Penina Weissfeld had lived there. He took us to see Mr. Klein on Gorky Street, who graciously offered us coffee but had no memory of my ancestors. His mother had died not long ago; perhaps she would have remembered.

We drove to the small synagogue, its painted ceiling still gorgeous, where Mr. Hoffman gave me three old prayer books; the Jewish population there is aging and dwindling. Then he too bundled into the taxi for the ride to the cemetery. Surely Penina was resting here, but we could not find her stone in the snow. The tombs of four rabbis were enclosed in a small building and, like the Hasidim who had recently visited, I lit candles and left a prayer on a scrap of paper. But the prayer had already come true.

John Abbe reminds us about the Awakening the Dreamer symposia that are beginning to take root in El Norte. The project emerges through John Perkins, Lynne Twist and friends’ relationships with the Achuar people living in the Ecuadoran Amazon basin.

Indigenous people of South America, who still live in their traditional Earth-honoring ways, refer to our modern worldview as our “dream” and have urged us, for the sake of all life, to “change the dream of the North.” Well, it appears that changing this collective dream of ours will be a do-it-yourself-together project. It will be accomplished by committed individuals working in concert with one another, tens of millions of us, each willing to think and act in a whole new way.

This is one of the generating principles behind the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium. The Symposium explores the link between three of humanity’s most critical concerns: environmental sustainability, social justice and spiritual fulfillment. Using video clips from some of the world’s most respected thinkers, along with inspiring short films, leading edge information and dynamic group interactions, the Symposium allows participants to gain a new insight into the very nature of our time, and the opportunity we have to shape and impact the direction of our world with our everyday choices and action.

There’s a symposium in San Francisco on February 4 and I’d like to go, intrigued about what I will learn for daily life and practice of social artistry.

The occasional Open Space Listserv Limited Form Poetry Celebration and Contest has begun again. Corrigan suggested satire, and Joelle (the current Poet Laureate) assented. I know that we covered satire in Mrs. Brant’s eighth grade English, but I was sick that week.

There was a young man who had learned a good trick.
He stood up and asked them all “what makes you tick?”
They wrote a few words and he went for a walk.
He returned and they cried “it was so good to talk!”
They hugged him and gave him a kiss on the neck
As he walked out the door to deposit the check.

Atlas strains to stay standing.
His stone limbs faintly shaking,
he gazes far off as if to forget
this cruel, pressing mass he must lift
until time ends. Holding space is a curse.

Chris Weaver posts an evocative comment at Chris Corrigan’s
parking lot:

to me it is mysterious and wonderful that the experience of deep connection with nature bears with it an experience of acceptance and love from nature herself ~ a felt experience that i, too, am a living part of all this. for those who have been culturally isolated from such experiences, there is a need for a guide to shape the moment, to show: here is a way to honor a tree, to greet a sunrise, to offer corn meal to a fire.

for the wisdom that grows from the experience of interdependence to be sustained, however, it is necessary to converse with death, to somehow be death’s guest for a while. i am thinking that to nurture the evolution of the wisdom-based age, it is time to provide for people a ceremonial experience of courting death, as a living third way to avoid both individual self-destructive habits and also the mass export of heartless death upon other beings and nature.

miraculously enough, the wisdom of how to do this is rising, quietly, from springs in every land.

My friend Steve and I have circled around this point as we indulge in the despair of wondering if it’s already too late, and re-emerge into the present calling. We are reconnecting with Joanna Macy’s visionary work to guide us and others across these thresholds. But Chris is like don Juan here, sinking to the heart of the matter.

I fell in love with Eugenia jamming full throated Joni Mitchell songs on a folk guitar in the dormitory foyer. Or maybe it was hitching to the Carmel beach in the bed of an artichoke truck, or maybe drinking Irish coffees at Savoy Tivoli in her double breasted pinstriped Italian jacket from the thrift store, talking Christian mystics and revolutionary nonviolence.

There are people with whom our lives intertwine, and I could not be more grateful to have this honor with this one. We did not marry, but have cultivated a soulful knowing of one another while living our lives of jobs and relationships and travels and spirit. Things have their rhythm, and we had been two years out of touch until she called not long ago.

We grew up across the American river from one another, and it’s a delight to welcome her here in her innertube with her wacky grin and well-worn dancing shoes. See her adventure photos, cute new boyfriend and ecstatic poetry thru my Laxmi lady link.

Steve and I have been driving into San Francisco on occasional Friday nights for public talks sponsored by Stewart Brand’s latest project, the Long Now Foundation. Brand (who helped spread the first photos of the Earth from space, on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog) has, as is typical, brought together eccentric and brilliant folk for these evenings, as speakers and audience. (San Francisco: lots of black clothing.) Silicon techies and socialcyberneticists and master gardeners and such.

Last Friday we were treated to a “non-debate” in which two expert and opinionated speakers listened to one another and tried to repeat back the salient points of each other’s presentations to mutual satisfaction. Fantastic.

The topic was nuclear power as an answer to climate instability, and the speakers were Peter Schwartz (Global Business Network) and Ralph Cavanagh (National Resources Defense Council.) I came away with my opinion unchanged (no) but much better informed, and it was very entertaining.

The highlight of the evening was an exchange in which all three men agreed that climate is a (if not the) central issue of our time. And the question became, who still does not believe this? And the answer became, two people, maybe three; and their names are George, Richard, and Karl. (Even within the white house there may be no others.)

This is stuff at the largest level of myth and archetype; the realm of the largest story that can be imagined while also having its feet firmly on the ground. These three guys in this white house on the east coast, and the fate of this little experimental planet in a gigantic floating whirlpool of light.

Not that I ever started listening to these three guys, but let’s contemplate ignoring them completely.

There is a deeper story that people I know have been living amidst this past year. Spurred by my old/new friend Steve and old/new friends among activists and artists in Sonoma county, I’m immersed in this emerging story of peak oil and climate instability; planetary narratives of transition and danger.

We who pay acute attention to these narratives comb newspapers, journals, websites and listservs, sharing the differing perspectives we come across: scientists measuring ice floes in the Arctic, oil industry analysts making educated guesses about Saudi Arabia’s reserves, ecologists and engineers debating nuclear power and biodiesel as options. We argue online and we muddle toward collaborations in our communities (which is where the juice is, for me.)

The following is from James Lovelock, the British scientist who originated the Gaia hypothesis, the old/new understanding that the Earth is alive. I have read a great deal recently, but this piece went right into my heart. (Heavily excerpted with no ellipses…to mark the places I cut.)

My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth’s physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth’s family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilization are in grave danger.

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 percent of the Earth’s surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

By failing to see that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we have blundered into trying to do it ourselves, acting as if we were in charge. By doing this, we condemn ourselves to the worst form of slavery. If we chose to be the stewards of the Earth, then we are responsible for keeping the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface right for life. A task we would soon find impossible – and something before we treated Gaia so badly, she had freely done for us.

So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilization is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent.

We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.
© 2006 The Independent

I was writing about Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Genesis (HarperCollins, 1996). His lengthy introduction tells the story of why, and how, he went about the translation. And we would be disappointed were there not also transformative interpretation.

The God of Genesis is a human creation, not the God at the center of the universe. Whenever God is presented as a character, that presentation is partial, therefore false. God is not a character in a story; God is the whole story.

Words such as God and Tao and Buddha-nature only point to the reality that is the source and essence of all things, the luminous intelligence that shines from th depths of the human heart. The ancient Jews named this unnamable reality YHVH, “that which causes (everything) to exist,” or, even more insightfully, ehyeh, “I am.” Yet God is neither here nor there, neither before nor after, neither outside nor inside. As soon as we say that God is God, or even that God is, we have missed it.

…The largest consciousness in the book of Genesis is not the consciousness of its God character but the consciousness of its great writers, who include everything, and who don’t see the opponent as the enemy. These writers have a generosity of spirit that always embraces the perspective of the unchosen, the defeated….In this sense, Genesis is a book that is filled with God’s own generosity.

Chris the Weaver evokes a sacred realm into which I happily fall.

the moment savors itself:
the light of early dawn finds me
tending the fire, up all night
in this winter-clearing encampment
an ashes-on-my-face, hair-grasped
in-my-fists night of plumbing
the great fissures i know await
in the landscape ahead. sometimes
i wonder who picked me to feel
the rumbling of karmic debt, who tuned
my body to the magnetism of that magma
moving beneath all of our feet. so
i make coffee, sitting across the fire
from this hulking companion called
the immensity of the task, this
impossibly armored shape called
the odds;

I love roaming around in the metaphorest. Blessings on you Chris.