antonio and the daemon

is it cheating to post a snip from a post of a long time ago? hell, i’m just posting this for me.

remembering my old friend and teacher antonio nunez. antonio used to piss us off in class, because we not-even-green consultants would ask him, antonio, what do you do with clients? and he would say, i love them. no really, antonio, what do you do with clients? and he would say, no, really, i love them. it took lots of open space to learn how simply this could be operationalized…

i was reading james hillman last night and contemplating my daemon. what’s the connection, i mused, between gatekeeping and spaceholding? i had recently hung a touching art piece made for me by zephyr madrone, back when i was admissions officer at CIIS. the piece is called “gatekeeper” and it hung below the plexiglas placard Admissions next to my office door. it’s a dancing serpent, which i later recognized as Journey of the Spirit in harrison’s first book, and sometime later was able to call Torah.

ah, the connection is this: WELCOME. welcome to this place, and anything is possible, and i honor you; and i will soon step out of the way and applaud from the sidelines. my favorite day at CIIS was graduation day; it felt like watching birds take flight who were once in eggs i had sat on awhile. it’s the same feeling after the closing circle of an open space, if it’s the end of our work together. it’s love.

the oslist poem contest

I blogged a bit about the poem I sent to the OSLIST contest, then withdrew, then sent again.

Well, it won. So I get to put on my resume that I’ve twice been elected poet laureate of this international listserv. I look forward to someday talking with a prospective employer about what that means to me, as this list has been a silvery web of support across the planet for so many of us in the open space community.

The sweetest treat was to receive this gift: Diane Cline, whom I have never met, made a beautiful graphic rendering of my poem. This gesture is a taste of the generosity and creativity of the community. I won’t forget it.

Diane Cline’s artwork

thickening the plot

Catherine has decided to blog in detail about the economic news of the past week. And she links to a new article by Greg Palast:

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

stopping the long war

Juan Cole posted a guest editorial by William Polk which is a long, historically informed, realistic and imaginative essay on the situation of the US and Iraq and the future of both.

I want to talk with you today about three things;

First, what is our struggle in Iraq costing us;

Second, the nature of terrorism, guerrilla warfare and insurgency; and

Third, what should we do now.

I first read Polk a few years ago when he co-authored an article and book with George McGovern which framed a comprehensive plan to leave Iraq and invest significantly and strategically in healing its civil society, saving lives and money and face and perhaps both countries.

Polk is blunt about the grand strategy which animated the Bush presidency.

The strategy behind these operations is what the Neoconservative advisers to President Bush have called “the Long War.” A leading member of the Neoconservatives, James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, said he hopes it will not last more than 40 years. The cost of such a generational conflict has been estimated at more than $17 trillion dollars.

This is a watershed election. I hoped that the new US Congress would force an end to this failed strategy last year. We must drive into office a new President who will do so because it’s a clear mandate from the American people and it can and must be done.

on tellygraft hill

This gorgeous sunday morning, spring in the sunshine and still winter in the shade, is the perfect day to retire blog riogrand-i-o and welcome tellygraft.

I first read an old song about “tellygraft hill” in a book by gary snyder, which I have to find again. That old sensibility has some value, from the time when there was a telegraph here (rather than coit tower), the year when my great grandfather passed through on the way to the cornish mining towns of the sierra nevada.

I don’t romanticize the frontier, the leading edge of the invasion. Having lived here for a few generations and stretched the resilience of living systems toward tipping or breaking points, the euro-american culture into which I was born requires intensive and ingenious transformation, in humble collaboration with others.

My intent is to honor the history of counter-cultural inspiration born on tellygraft hill, and hope to join those standing on the shoulders of our elders to look around and share what we see.

the wounds are restimulated

Rabbi Michael Lerner in Tikkun:

We mourn the 8 lives lost and the wounded in Yeshivat Mercaz Harav just as we mourn the 120 lives lost in Gaza last week, the hundreds wounded, and the many wounded and killed in Sderot and Ashkelon….

The wounds of two thousand years of exile and the holocaust are inevitably restimulated by this kind of attack, and tragically the price will likely be paid by Palestinian civilians, who in turn will fight back and then the price will be paid by other Israelis. Thus the seemingly endless cycle of violence will continue….

We understand that these killings can only be understood in the context of the 60 year old struggle between these two communities, and that nothing short of a full peace accord that will require a new open-heartedness on both sides can possibly break this horrible cycle of violence.

Thanks to Juan Cole for the link.

Catherine Austin Fitts

I’ve now linked to Catherine’s blog, because her expertise as an investment banker and high government official is now in spirited service to developing strategies to safely ride the rapids.

Today she reposted a fundamental analysis that she first shared in 2003.

The current state of the U.S. economy is simply dreadful. This is thoroughly covered up by a willingness of foreign investors to continue to finance a negative return on investment system. Theoretically, one can maintain a negative return on investment system so long as one can finance it. The notion that it cannot be financed forever is probably a driving force behind the efforts by the two Bush and the Clinton Administrations to build the legal, political and physical infrastructure for the occupation of the US by its own military armed with a dazzling high tech toolkit of non-lethal weapons and the authority to impose martial law.

When and if US homeowners discover that their private property and public land, water and minerals all belong to America’s creditors, tensions may rise. This is particularly true when a penciling in of the numbers will show that the US leadership has intentionally been moving public and private resources offshore since the mid 1990’s — much of it in fraudulent and illegal ways. The folks whom the US middle class will depend on for financial capital are the same folks who stole all their retirement savings and tax money.

…From my experience serving as a member of, and then from the outside as a close observer of, US leadership, I am led to believe that those in positions of power have concluded that a steady reduction in living standards combined with a depopulation/ immigration strategy is the most practicable solution to the issue of nonsustainability of our current living standard within existing power structures… In short, the leadership’s way of dealing with non-sustainability is to consider a significant portion of the US and global population as sub-human, exploitable and expendable.

Here’s where the addiction to the thrill of US presidential politics (especially when there are apparently quite worthy candidates) distracts from frankly more fundamental questions. If the new president is not motivating a citizenry around reversing such a strategy, we are still left to our own households and communities, another year later.

So Catherine has also updated her Solari model as a guide for re-investing in that which we trust in a way that gives us energy.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the organizational and investment building block that is needed to build a new and profitable alignment among people, natural resources and money. This model is the building block that will allow global investors to generate high capital gains from building healthy people in beautiful, safe and environmentally rich and cared-for places — not just from extraction and consumption. It’s called a solari – an investment databank and investment advisor for your neighborhood that is created and controlled locally and can access capital both locally and globally. A network of solaris and the equity pools they will create and manage are the most significant capital gains opportunity in America today.

A solari offers the opportunity for higher returns to all Americans — a soccer mom, a trucker, the general counsel of an insurance company, the young man or woman who works the late shift at the food mart on Route 66 or a Wall Street master of the universe. It does not matter where you went to school or who you know. It does not matter if you are young or old, male or female, black or white, rich or poor. If you are a person who loves making things work, a solari can help you find and mine the “diamonds” in your own backyard.

on poetry on the oslist

When my father died I grieved all year.
But Michael Stipe was right that sweetness follows.

When it’s over,
A cloud of feeling lingers, calls up memories,
shows me the world with eyes more raw, more open
to this stark, leafless maple growing in the sidewalk.
And shows me to the work that’s next to do.

When it’s over,
We might start that lovely, awkward dance of hugs,
and wait our turn to hug Ralph, and Chris, Karen,
Joelle, and Lisa, everyone who won and wrote and read,
and lay a wreath for Laurel on the earth.

When it’s over,
we might stand in Harrison’s circle with hands joined
and faces outward, hearts burst open to the horizon
and the mystery of walking toward it, alone and
together, finding spaces snapping open like poppies.

I wrote this poem to honor three threads: The poetry contest series on the open space listserv, that began some years ago, might be coming to a natural end from depleted interest; I would not want it to end without an appreciation of it; and the contest invitation this time says, please write of your inner experience in open space.

(Thursday evening – Now I hear there is plenty of interest – people writing poems to be collected and shared with the oslist – so I got the inkling to withdraw this poem from the contest. Because it’s not over, after all! But then I changed my mind. I’m glad I don’t have a lot of readers to confuse and write annoyed comments.)

london

Claude Monet: London: Houses of Parliament at Sunset (1903).

I was in/near London only three days and my senses were constantly engaged, so I have a final set of memories to share.

I spent an hour in the museum and walked back to the south bank of the Thames to be immersed in the most intense sunset I have ever witnessed. Add some fire to Monet’s palette and lose none of his subtlety. The buildings (and bridges) are now tastefully shaped by lights that enhance the pervasive glow without interfering. And the river is as Monet shows, a gorgeous flowing mirror. What a treat to catch one night like this.

I was daily in the Underground at commute time for the high-speed ballet of thousands of people in black overcoats and black shoes moving in rapid lines up and down the network of escalators and staircases from level to level, train to train. I know every city is like this – I’m spoiled on the cable cars at off-peak hours – but there I imagined being in the midst of a Pink Floyd animation with “Money” or “Time” playing in the background.

I transferred at Waterloo station for the train to Salisbury on Monday morning, and thought “what should I buy to eat on the train ride?” when there appeared the latest juxtaposition of ancestral and postpostmodern. I grew up eating Cornish pasties (pass-tees) made the traditional way, with cubed meat, onions, potatoes and spices, wrapped in a buttery, flaky crust. In Cornwall I had trouble finding them well made. But now Pasty.com has fast outlets everywhere, and the traditional meat pie that they handed me was really excellent, just like mom and my aunts make. Another special dimension to the journey to Stonehenge!

what a real one looks like

In 2003 San Francisco supervisor Matt Gonzalez ran a mayoral campaign that shook up the city. Despite a late start getting into the race, he won enough votes to force a runoff election against Gavin Newsom, who had big advantages in wealthy support and name recogition.

Matt organized a campaign that drew upon the passions of artists and musicians, students and poor people, marginalized and outcast. And he won 47% of the runoff votes in an election that electrified San Francisco.

Now Matt is Ralph Nader’s vice presidential running mate. I saw them together a couple of years ago in a reception at Matt’s law office, where Ralph spoke and signed books. Ralph’s choice does not surprise me.

The best line in today’s SF Chronicle coverage (by Zachary Coile and Cecilia M. Vega) is from Rich DeLeon, a professor emeritus at San Francisco State University.

“I hear some right-wing commentators describe Obama as a left-wing radical. We just laugh,” DeLeon said. “There’s a certain function the Nader-Gonzalez ticket can play in reminding people what a real left-wing radical in the American system looks like. In that context, Obama looks more like an acceptable political centrist.”