Airplane Slow...

Now the challenges begin.

I thought this morning that I should schedule a retreat after Conversation Week. Somewhere beautiful, relaxing, uplifting, surrounded by grand people.

This afternoon an invitation came in for all that - for free. The only hitch is... it's in upstate New York. I checked the train. It would be 3 days from here to New York City. Only $312. Sitting up all the way. I wrote the organizer, thanking him but guessing I might pass on it. He wrote back:
"i took a sabbatical earlier this year and to get to europe i sailed. let's just say that i will forego europe entirely before sailing there again!"

So where can I go closer to home? There's the Korean Spa in Lynnwood. No joke. It's total self care for under $100. I could organize a gaggle of girlfriends to take a day together there and maybe go to a show in Seattle. Then I checked out Breitenbush. Yep, I could take two days there ($100 plus gas and massage) before speaking in Vancouver, WA.

In the old days (and maybe the future) I'd travel if the destination, purpose and the people appealed and somehow it was 'free'. I hid from myself that it wasn't free to the earth and it wasn't free really as it took those two travel days and two pack/unpack days to make the days away happen. I was a tad enthralled with these unbidden opportunities for high play, good work and deep conversation. In the new days of this Airplane fast I'm discovering it's like most other 'diets.' You substitute one pleasure for another and discover tastes for things that formerly seemed ordinary or invisible. Like people who now vacation in their cars because flight and hotels and exchange rates are through the roof, will I gush eventually about all the beauties close to home?

I also recognize that this constraint is voluntary for me and imposed for most others. I understand that fasting in this way is as much an expression of my privilege as flying. We all live in the ambiguity of the times.

My Fall Workshops, Lectures, Conferences

IFG Teach-In on CONFRONTING THE TRIPLE CRISIS
September 14-16, Washington DC
http://ifg.org/events/TripleCrisisUpdatedSchedule.pdf
My workshops are Sunday Morning

• Consumption Addiction with Thomas Princen and Michael Maniates
• "Rethinking Freedom in a World with Limits"
  
• We live in the era of limits, of the consequences of our actions, addictions and avoidances of the truth. Freedom as no limits, the American cowboy, cornucopia and individualist ethic, has hit a wall of reality. Oil, gas, water, fisheries, agricultural land are all stressed. The nation and individuals are so far in debt financially and ecologically that our "structural adjustments" will be fierce. And soon. The good news, though, is that life after excess will be better. Amazing breakthroughs can happen as we hit the reality wall if we know how to absorb the shock of limits and transform them. Authentic freedom is the mastery of limits. Facing the death of a way of life will take inner work as well as outer change. Getting sober after our addiction will return us to our families, communities and integrity. There are skills of feeling free in a finite world. We can practice stopping when we are stopped, looking at how we got here and the clear instructions written on the wall we just hit, and listening for wisdom to learn the lessons we need to live well locally... on less stuff ... but with a large spirit of possibility and opportunity. Activists who learn the concepts, tools, techniques and processes of liberation at limits will lead the way in their communities. Without facing limits and finding authentic freedom, all actors in the system will make matters worse.
  

WHAT'S THE ECONOMY FOR ANYWAY? CONFERENCE
October 5-7, Washington DC
http://www.timeday.org/economyconference/agenda.asp
Dare to ask the BIG QUESTION: What’s the economy for, anyway? Is it just about having the biggest GDP or the highest Dow Jones average? Or is it about providing for a healthy, happy, fair and sustainable society?

My lecture October 6 at 9 AM "What Does Freedom Mean?"

• Freedom as "no limits" is the toxic mindset that drives hyper-consumption, hyper-competition, hyper-individualism and hyper-speed. They all lead to "hyper-whatever", an inability to develop shared cultural values and a lax permission for consumerism and "more is better" to continue as our one shared story of the good life. "This is a free country" we say as though that entitled us to compete for the last ounce of goodness in the commons. But "freedom within limits" is actually and always the truth, and transforming our economy will come naturally as we understand our limits and work with them rather than straining against them. Insanity is trying to enact limitlessness - a spiritual truth - in the material world. America leads the world in this cowboy, cornucopia freedom. Our debt and domination of the rest of the world's resources is testimony to our failure to grow up and show up as a mature global player. The good news is that once you are clear about your limits, you are free to put them where they will channel the essential freedom at the heart of the Universe towards healthy ends - like shorter work time, healthy living, great relationships and lots of fun. We need to give up what we never had - the freedom to go beyond all limits.

GREEN FESTIVAL
October 5-7, Washington DC
My workshop is Saturday October 6^th at 3PM in room 204AB.

Speaking – and Listening – Across the Divides

Red-Blue. Rich-Poor. Culture wars. Nimby. Money. Power. Resources. The issues we care about most are dying on rhetorical battlefields. Are our efforts to fight pollution, corruption, destruction, genocide being lost because of our un-civil wars of words? How can we speak our truth without polarizing? How can we win without assassinating our adversaries in our minds – and words? What strategies work for softening rigidity and discovering fresh solutions? When have your ideas prevailed without antagonizing ‘the other’? Share your stories of speaking and listening across your front line divides. Learn ways to invite ‘the other’ into conversation, to pose questions that open minds and hearts, to turn down the heat when tempers flare, to turn polarization into inquiry and to move your message non-violently

What *IS* Freedom Anyway? July 4, 2006

Death by Hyper-Freedom
Vicki Robin
July 4, 2006

This morning the coastal fog hugged my little village tight, the sunny feeling of blue skies, parades and expansive American freedom very far from our shores.

I love that sunny feeling. I love that most American part of myself: my optimistic, generous, can-do self. The world is my oyster… and I’ll share because there’s plenty.

But a fog has rolled in on freedom in America and before it rolls out for the day, yielding to sunshine, potlucks and parades, I want to reflect on the fog of self-centeredness, self-importance and overall self-ishness that now passes for freedom in America. Underneath the rhetoric, both on the streets and in the ‘halls of power’ you hear playground taunts. “It’s mine and I can do whatever I want with it. You can’t tell me what to do. I got here first and you can’t have it.” This bully freedom, entitlement freedom, numero-uno freedom has troubled me for a very long time. Almost as long as the can-do freedom, the generous freedom, the expansive, inventive, creative freedom has fueled my life.

I recently offered a workshop on freedom using one possible title for my upcoming book: If this is a free country, why don’t I feel free? Nobody signed up. Thankfully, I found it curious rather than devastating. One friend offered this explanation: “I don’t see that I have a freedom problem. What would I, or anyone, get from it?” In other words, he has real problems. Relationships. Food. Job. Aging. Money. Insecurity. Discrimination. Parents. Kids.

Actually, I think these are all freedom problems. Problems with the partial – and therefore devastating – current idea of freedom in America.

Here’s why. The very hallmark freedoms that permit the sunny version of America have now gone hyper because we’ve made anything that limits us the enemy of our freedom.

Limits, though, enable freedom. They shape and direct freedom. We all place boundaries to protect what we cherish and express what's within us. Art, design, houses, games, marriages, markets, traffic, values are generated by limits. Rather than talk intelligently about limits, though, we rail against them. We want to grow without limit. And this hyper-freedom is killing us.

Competition in an open and free marketplace has become hyper-competition, a war of all against all. From pre-school to board rooms, the competition for the few seats at the wee table is fierce. As the wealth gap increases, the race to occupy the top 10% gets more ruthless. If you want your kid to go to Harvard rather than flip burgers, gotta start his education early. Like in the womb. Birth is way too late.

Choice has gone hyper too. From being able to select from a range of products rather than one state issued pair of shoes, we’ve entered the era of oppressive, obsessive choosing – picking the right cell phone, internet service provider, car, computer, cereal, investment, vacation and on and on. And who has the time – we have to work 2 jobs to afford it all.

Which brings me to time. From the freedom to work hard to get ahead we’ve gone to hyper-speed: 24/7/365. If you don’t keep pace, someone else, right behind you, will get ahead of you. The need to exceed the speed of those you are competing with has us sacrificing sleep to keep up. As John deGraaf, founder of TAKE BACK YOUR TIME, contends, we need time to care – to love, parent, learn, worship – and as a society we are not time friendly. Even activists suffer, urgently keeping pace with the train-wrecks of injustice, war, global warming and more.

Each individual’s freedom to have, do or be what we want has become hyper-individualism, a burdensome loneliness of people cut loose from community, who pay for connection by bonding with companies that don’t care about them, eschewing churches then going to workshops and therapists to simply be heard, losing first loves and not knowing where to find the next one. The up and coming household is single. With cat. Like mine.

How many of our relationship, food, job, aging, money, insecurity, etc. problems are rooted in this hyper-freedom world where the only way we know to feel free is to get away from what holds us. It is harder to bond today. Harder to stay bonded. Harder to have job security, harder to care for our bodies and families, harder to find love because the forces of dissolution – away – are so much stronger than the forces of connection. The ties that bind immediately pinch – and we move on. Studies show that loneliness and isolation lead to body and soul disease and early death. We treat the symptoms, but do not question this toxic freedom that convinces us all that to be free is to be on top, at choice, on the go and on our own.

Sustainability is certainly a freedom problem. How can we address overshoot – the condition we’ve been in since the mid-70’s of using up more of the earth’s resources than can be replenished – if we can’t tolerate the fact of limits. Hyper-freedom says we can just get away from problems: invent something new, farm in Siberia, live in space, live in a gated community, find a substitute source of fuel. How, pray tell, will we substitute for water. We are up against major limits and in total denial, and hyper-freedom is the major enabler.

No, it’s not a free country anymore. We are not free to rest, to eat good food, to hang out with people we love, slow down, live at a sane pace, feel secure in our communities without sending armies to our borders or distant lands to stop people before they come and get our good life.

Oh, except for our few holidays, like 4th of July. Today. Freedom day. And what are we celebrating again? I’ll celebrate freedom in America when we get off the hypers and settle down to being a decent kid on the big planetary block, working and playing well with others, valuing our souls and collectively setting some boundaries we collectively respect. Give me grown up liberty or I fear we are all choosing death by hyper-freedom.

*****

p.s. later in the day after the fantastic picnic and parade

Today George Lakoff in the Boston Globe also wrote about the framing battle over freedom in America*. He, like me, counted the number of times...

"President Bush, in his second inaugural address, used ``freedom," ``free," and ``liberty"... 49 times in 20 minutes. ``Liberty" has become the watchword of the radical right. The right has taken over the use of these words as part of its appropriation of patriotism. Progressives must reclaim not merely the words ``freedom" and ``liberty," but the ideas that made this a free country. To lose freedom is awful; to lose the idea of freedom would be worse."

A political advisor yesterday, hearing me speak, said the "right" wins in the voting booth because of our uneasiness with "hyper-freedoms." It stands for "law and order" (who wants lawlessness and disorder?), "safety" (who wants danger as a collective way of life?), "protection" (no one wants to be defenseless). Can you see how the conversation needs to shift to where we place our limits to get more of what we value, not freedom vs. limits? Yes we all have "family values." How absurd to think "the left" wants a rootless, valueless, disconnected, dissolute America, but that's how the "freedom" issue shows up.

We need to ask: "What values do we actually share here in America?" Answering that seriously will take real soul searching. Consumerism wins because it's the one common good, or goods. Americans (so the myth goes) all want, deserve and have a right to more stuff. Don't fence me in when I'm at the store!

But if we agree, for example, that good families are essential to a good society (as they always have been!), then we ask, "What are the qualities of good families that we want more of?" There's a great conversation for you! Safety? Protection? Care for the young? Education in "knowing right from wrong"? Love? I am certain "left" and "right" would generate very similar lists. Then we ask, "What minimal limits must we collectively place on ourselves - through laws and culture - to get the good families we want? How do we win the 'good family' game?" Okay, we're back to the debate, but with a lot of respectful conversation and shared understanding. We arrive someplace in the vicinty of families where there is love, stability and decency over time. So how do we get that? Well, now we're into the very lively diversity that is America.

We need to get out of the debate with its dueling frames. We need to get into the respectful conversations about "what we hold dear" and "what limits we agree on to protect those essential goods."

Lakoff is correct. The left has lost all the important marbles: freedom, values, morality, law, order, family. What's left is not recapturing the flag, but questioning the game. We all want freedom, values, morality and such. How - through what permissions and prohibitions - will get us there... that's actually the essence of the conversation that is democracy in America and in that conversation all the jingoistic, bombastic, ideological bullsh-t (left and right) will be as convincing as an Emperor who has no clothes.

Remembering on Memorial Day 2006

They died that we may be free
Vicki Robin
Memorial Day, 2006

Today is Memorial Day, memory day, the day we remember all who have given their lives to save their people from losing what is more precious than life, to protect and preserve family, land, ideals and dreams.

First and foremost we think of young men and women who died in American wars. They died horribly and too soon - by guns, knives, bombs, suffocation, torture, starvation, poison, drowning and finally, if the war they fought haunts and hounds them into civilian life, suicide. Perhaps before they died a love they’d never known – for comrades, ideals, the present moment – entered them and exalted them. Probably, though, they were numb, terrified, cowardly and ashamed, out of their minds, hopeless, heartsick, homesick and depressed. Maybe an even more frightening feeling came – of love for the enemy - a sense the people being killed deserved to live, had been little boys who made their mothers proud, had families of their own who would grieve beyond bearing. Mai Lai and now the slaughter of innocents by Marines in Haditha, Iraq dramatically remind us that we ask our soldiers to not only sacrifice their lives but their souls.

The ones who served and survived often never actually leave the war – the brotherhood, the immediacy, the sense of mission and purpose bond veterans of the better wars into lifelong legions. The rest of us cannot understand, really, what both the living and dead endured. No matter what we think about the wars these men and women have fought, we must love and honor them and thank them with all our hearts. No matter how angry we might be with our country, how cynical we might have become about human goodness, these people are heroes because we will never know if their sacrifice actually allowed us to live in our homes, villages, cities, families and enjoy barbeques and storytelling until darkness falls and the fireflies wink their friendly “all clear” at the end of the day.

Others, too, have given their lives for a better world. Some, like Gandhi, King, Jesus, Romero, Robert Kennedy and on and on, also died in the middle of their fight for freedom. Some, like Allende, John Kennedy and Sadat, sacrificed their private lives for elected public service and were assassinated by the secret armies of the dominators, be they governments or Mafias or gangs or fanatics or, as we label them to reassure ourselves we are good, terrorists. The world is full of terrorists – full of cruel people who would kill, main and torture once the fire in their souls has gone to cold ash. The frontier of terrorism is everywhere – and in everyone who struggles to keep love alive in the middle of the horrors that come when fear turns to rage turns to impotence turns to hatred turns to predation on one another. Thank God for every single person, every nun in South America, every forest dweller, every social worker in slums, every nurse, doctor, mother and friend who has kept the light of love alive in terrible times. I remember them, not their innumerable names but their sacrifice and pray to never be so comfortable in my small, peaceful corner of the world that I forget. That I forget.

We wake each day on the frontier. Will we face the enemies squarely, pushing back those rivulets of cruelty, indifference and cowardice before they become a torrent and push us to greater brutality and shame? Will we remember the fallen by getting up ourselves in the emptiness of the morning and picking one enemy within to meet toe to toe, eye to eye?

I ask myself on this Memorial Day, “What would I die for?” Fortunately a pretty serious brush with death a few years ago helps me find an answer I can imagine is true. I too give my life for freedom – for the courage to love the dark and light of this world, to accept it just as it is, to put in my oar towards a better future with humility and irony intact, to be precisely honest with myself and others, to be grateful for the infinite number of small pleasures there to be tasted if only I can stay awake, to risk humiliation if the seed of creativity insists on growing up through the concrete of my caution, for saying “I’m sorry, please forgive me” as many times as need be (and they are many). I am not afraid to die physically. I now know for certain that I will – and it’s not the end of the world, so to speak. I am afraid of the living death of encroaching resignation and lies. So this Memorial Day, after breaking my heart thinking about the young who died in wars not of their making, I vow to remember to fight the wars before me with all my heart and soul.

Feeling Free - Birthday Message 2005

July 4, 2005

Hello friends,

Like kids who were born around Christmas, I've always secretly considered July 4 mine - the bonfires and fireworks I took as warm-up celebrations for my birthday, July 6.

In two days, I'll turn 60. And George Bush will turn 59. And the Dalai Lama will turn 70. Ever since I found out who shares my birthday, I've wanted to make some something of it (being the meaning junkie I am). Given that we three have been born between two Western liberation days, July 4 and Bastille Day (July 14), and now that I am 6 months away from finishing my book on freedom (Feel Free; Rethinking Freedom in a World with Limits) I'm gonna make something out of that.

All three of us have pledged our lives to freedom. At a material level, W considers himself a liberator of the Iraqi people, not to speak of the Afghani and everyone globally beset by terrorists. His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL for short) has spent decades trying to non-violently liberate Tibet from Chinese rule. And I, too, have spent decades promoting independence - from money worries, but also from the whole consumer mindset. I have, to be honest, sometimes had the fervor (unto righteousness) of W. If you could hear my thoughts (many of which go right by without my notice), you'd catch sentences like, "This consumer feeding frenzy of stuff must stop! Now! I said NOW!". To my credit, I have also had the spaciousness of HHDL, often seeing with equanimity the vast, multi-faceted context out of which our delusional consumer culture arises.

All three of us are also in the soul liberation biz. W has found his salvation in Jesus, and some might read his kowtowing to the Religious Right as a sincere belief that we'd all be better off as Christians. HHDL is, first and foremost, a Buddhist monk engaged in the precise work of freeing himself from illusion at every level - lifetime after lifetime. I am more of a spiritual mongrel. I have the salvation bent of my Western Religious heritage, believing in the Kingdom of Heaven as my true home. I also seek liberation into the infinite now through attention and intention, influenced by Eastern traditions. And I've engaged in Native healing practices, from weekly Lakota sweat lodges to ceremonies with shamans from the lush jungles of South America. As I say in my book,

I’ve nosed along the fences between me and freedom my whole life, keen to openings where something fresh might blow in and swirl out musty ideas or now-dead routines. At age five I insisted on going to sleep-away camp. By eight I’d been to Cuba, by sixteen to Paris, by nineteen I was living in Spain for a year and at twenty-four I went cross-country in an old van with a guy and a dog. I started studying Utopian communities in high school, continued in college and was inventing my own within a decade. Every scrap of income was put into buying time rather than stuff – time to really taste existence up close and personal.

The range of meanings of freedom - from HHDL to W to me - says a lot. It means that the lived meaning of freedom in America in 2005 does not cover the whole territory. A NY Times July 4 editorial this morning had a welcome tinge of Patrick Henry...
The word "freedom" especially seems to have hardened around the edges in the last few years. It has lost some of its ability to suggest the open-ended potential of our lives, the possibility of coming to new terms with the expectations we have been handed by earlier generations. The overtones of discovery the word once had seem to have been put on hold. Instead, there is a new complacency, a certainty that we know just what freedom means and exactly how it should look. There is an unwelcome comfort with the inequitable distribution of freedom even in our own country. There is a poisonous tolerance for the idea that freedom encompasses only the right to say positive things about America and its mission in the world.

The liberal tradition of "freedom from" (tyranny of every stripe, from the state to overbearing neighbors) has become "I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, as long as ... it's my property, it doesn't hurt anyone (ahem... that I can see), it's not against the law or at least I don't get caught." But the freedom of "away" - getting away (with it), going away (from it) and keeping "it" away from you - has to be coupled with "freedom with" - the capacity to be with whatever arises in your life, whether inside your noggin or right in your face. If "away" is the only way to freedom, we're doomed. We do live in a round world. Materials go round and round - never away. People can run, but, given our roundness, they can't hide; away and back home are the same thing. Karma says, "What goes around, comes around." So does the Golden Rule. Anything we won't ultimately embrace, love and heal will meet us again on our next road to Samara - or in our next lifetime.

There's also the profound question, "What is freedom for?" Were we given freedom (by the Creator, by the Constitution, by the embedded principles of the Universe) so we could run, hide, invade, take, dominate, rule, escape, care for only our own? Or were we given freedom to be designers along with the Divine? If so, the holy secret is that limits along with other constraints like containers, boundaries, edges, borders, criteria, agreements, laws, principles, values, covenants and such, are the tools the Universe uses to create. Away and With are both essential. Freedom is the necessary raw expansive power of life, but limits are the shaping power of existence. All the beauty we make - in marriages, in art, in sustainable societies, in great religions - comes from knowing this secret of the "away/with" "freedom-in-limits/limits-in-freedom" paradox and embracing the exquisite tension of living where the two intersect.

For me, personal freedom comes from being present to everything that arises - within and without, touching everything with love. Janis Joplin had it half right: freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose... or gain. Relational freedom comes from knowing that everyone and everything is enacting their freedom, just like me, and is equally worthy of my respect and attention. Social freedom comes from knowing that no matter how dense and encrusted social/cultural conventions might be, they were made up by people like me, and people like me can change them. Political freedom is being engaged in the conversations that create the rules we live by and the collective plans we make. And spiritual freedom is the loving, generative space in which all this arises and passes away.

So there you have it - my birthday message along with a preview of Feel Free. Happy 4th, and for that matter 5th, 6th, 7th and all the rest.

Be well,
Vicki