No smiles?

No smiles?

While dropping off digital images to be printed into photographs at Flash Photo on Vashon, a curly-haired young man showed up for a passport photo.

“OK, don’t smile,” the photographer said. “The passport agency won’t take photos that are too smiley.”

You’ve got to be kidding, I thought. What about those for whom a smile is their default, if not their umbrella?

“No, they want relaxed facial muscles,” he explained.

OK.

The mood of the country.

The new default smile.

Thanks, thanks, thanks!

Thanksgiving 2007

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s all about gratitude, friends/family, and great food. What could be better?

Poetry, costumes, and imagination – our culture (and I) desperately need more of it.

It’s become a tradition since I moved to this house (now called Soundcliff) in 1989 to host friends for feasting on Thanksgiving Day. Each guest brings at least one dish, and a poem, story or blessing.

We usually eat turkey, but there have been years when we’ve ventured into goose, Beef Wellington, and even stuffed squid (that year the theme was “Aphrodesia”). One infamous Thanksgiving, one of the guests decorated himself with fruit and frosting and served himself on a giant cardboard/silver tray for dessert (along with an original poem, “I’ve been Desserted”).

This year’s theme: Subversive Conviviality and Conjunctive Creativity. In other words, we made it up as we went along.

Blessed with great weather and a near-full moon, we also took hikes and read poetry, sang songs and chants and incanted blessings between courses. We began at 1 p.m., and finished sometime around 11 p.m.

Friends often ask to see the menu, so this year I’ll put it on the blog:

Pupu Course: Spiced cider, Champagne, Martinelli’s Sparkling cider, San Pellegrino

• Coins de pomme de terres -- fingerling potatoes with leek butter and French sorrel chiffonade (Gordon and Doug)
• Croutons with homemade goat cheese and membrille (quince paste) (Doug)
• Assorted nuts, cheeses, pate, olives, and one pickled green tomato
• Avocado & black bean paste
  

[Two dachshunds on the porch—barking]

Poetry (Steven)

Soup course:
Sunshine soup (Malcolm)
Squash, golden beets, Yukon gold potatoes, sipolena onions, garlic, yellow fennel, pinch of curry, golden and red peppers

Salad course:

• Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Tom)
• Video: “Living Salad” – documentary of a ritual from last month where Doug Gosling served 40 people salad from a bed, which they ate on their knees with no hands (with spray vinigrette)
  

Mother Garden Confetti Salad (Doug Gosling of Occidental Arts & Ecology Center)
Baby lettuce, beets, carrots, & mizuna with pineapple guava vinegrette

Blessing circle: candle, globe, and 11 men (Sequoia)

Main course: Turkey (Gordon), dressing, sausage stuffing (Chris), sweet potato pecan cassarole (Sequoia), cranberry horseradish relish (Lurid Pink/Chris), mashed potatoes & celeriac (Dougo & Gordon), pumpkin date nut bread (Evan), ziti with fresh picked chard and mushrooms (Tom), guava chutney (Michael).

Palette cleanser: Lemon rosemary sorbet (Stephen)

Dessert:
Layers of Fall (Neil) : Carmel roasted pears, almond struessel, pumpkin chibouste, cider reduction Tuille triangle

Chai (Sequoia/Malcolm/Lirio) & after dinner whatevers (all)

So, with memories of that meal and all its layers filling me up even now, I wish you the best of this dark season. And despite supposed 'needs' of the money economy, I encourage engaging the gift economy: making presents, recycling things you love but are ready to let go of, and using the opportunity to communicate what needs and wants to be said to those you love (or maybe don't)...

The horns of our dilemmas

Table in our living room; painting by Mark Fockler

“Clarity about being messed up invites divinity.”

So said mythologist Michael Meade yesterday at an all-day workshop on “Leaping Between the Horns” – an exploration of how to live with the contradictions and craziness of these times.

Goddess knows we need a bit of divinity—but are we clear about being messed up?

If you look into the eyes of many Americans, especially at airports and shopping malls (those bastions of patriotism), it does seem there’s a “malaise,” as Jimmy Carter called it in the 1970’s. I certainly can feel disappointment and depression in the air.

Meade’s presentation was a tour de force of poetry, song, storytelling, drumming, philosophy, mythology, and active questioning. He invited us each to consider where we are in relation to the divine spark (an eagle in an African story he told) that is the reason we’re here. Are we fulfilling our higher purpose? Are we living up to our genius? How many of our own best ideas have we squelched?

He invited us to jump between the horns of our dilemmas, to pay more attention to our wounds--to consider what’s the core tension in our life. What happened in early childhood that might have blocked us from our true purpose? What initiation experiences might be incomplete? “Your wounds and your gifts may come from the same place.”

Culturally, he pushed for “olders” to become “elders,” to engage creatively with younger generations instead of retiring to golf courses. “Culture is the sum total of its imagination,” he said. “The world can only end if it runs out of stories.”

What kind of future can we imagine? That’s the task for young and old to engage together, as we tell stories that leap through the horns of our many personal and cultural dilemmas.

National Philanthropy Day

This fabulous booklet, Telling our Stories: Philanthropy in the Northwest, published by Philanthropy Northwest

National Philanthropy Day

Yes, it is! Happy “Love of Mankind” day. Practice a random act of philanthropy.

Last night I witnessed a dramatic depiction of organized philanthropy (arguably the most clunky kind) at the annual meeting (and 30th anniversary) of Philanthropy Northwest, our regional association of grantmakers.

It was stunning in its honesty and reminded me of my years working in the field of professional philanthropy. I learned:

• If you work for a foundation, people don’t always tell you the truth. They tell you what they think you want to hear. It can distort relationships.

• Power dynamics are at work, big time, when money is involved. There are the donors, then there are the “hired hands” who help distribute the money, then there are the supplicants, and the grantees.

• Foundations are actually repositories of “news” on the creative edges of culture, as they receive proposals for funding from social entrepreneurs. Journalists should pay more attention to this news source. (Especially the grant requests that are turned down.)

The presentation, Four Short Plays: Four Big Ideas, brilliantly directed by KJ Sanchez, was made up of tidbits remembered from interviews with people in the philanthropic realm. It highlighted disparities between rich and poor, intentions and “guidelines,” heart and head. I’m sure it made some people mad. I hope it inspires conversations that will, in fact, result in everybody becoming a philanthropist. (You don’t have to have money to love humankind.)

Why Blog?

Here I am at St. Mark's Square in Venice!
Why blog?

Because I can…
And must
Express
What I can
When I can
How I can…
I’ll feel better
It’s an open letter
I’ll get it off my mind
And into the blog
Out of the slog
Into the ether of the Internet
Into the noosphere
Maybe, just maybe
It’ll help me think more clearly
It’ll make me wiser
It’ll make us wiser
Why be a miser?
Co-create
The next way of saying
What game we’re playing
And how to move forward

Soundcliff
12 November 2007

What I would have said to the FCC

Over 200 of us spoke to the Federal Communications Commission – or to 4 of the 5 commissioners – last Friday in Seattle.

It was a great opportunity to ‘talk back’ to those who are the stewards of our broadcasting airwaves. They were considering whether to relax the current restrictions on media consolidation and cross-ownership (the law that says you can’t own both a newspaper and a TV station in the same town). About 1,000 of us showed up--all ages & colors, with only 5 days notice.

I spoke about how the sale of the Minneapolis newspaper to an out-of-town venture capital firm was not serving the public interest in the Twin Cities, or so it seemed to me. I honored the youth who brought their voices to the hearing, and who said things I wanted to say better than I could have.

And I urged the commissioners to look at the big picture, to help us maximize our communications capacity as citizens, to think about what will serve us as we reinvent democracy for this century. I suggested they keep a copy of the Constitution nearby as they do that, to help us:

• To learn what we need to know about the common good and social capital – and how each of us fits into that equation – to form a more perfect union. To listen to each other. To establish Justice.

• To be able to communicate with each other, with our media, with our government in a way that allows us to insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare.

• To have accurate information about how well our institutions and government are doing to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

My two minutes were up quickly. And of course in retrospect, I could have done better. I wish I had brought the painting that my friend Josh, who’s one of the 2 million Americans in prison, sent me a couple weeks before. “Liberty Awakening,” it’s called, and it says more than I can say in words. It was painted by a fellow inmate.



Whew. (What does it say to you?)

Then I would have shared a bit of what we’re learning in our Journalism That Matters gatherings around the country:

• that media literacy is critical to our future

• that basic skills of journalism (verification, multiple sources, etc.) be part of our education from a very young age

• that media learn better how to mediate our conversations as citizens, by convening and encouraging conversations of all types

• that the 5 W’s of journalism need to be expanded beyond who, what, where, when and why to include a sixth: What’s possible now?

What’s possible now? A better, more diverse communication system that serves us and our communities as we reinvent democracy.