Brazil photos

BRAZIL, WOMEN, TRANSITIONING AND TALKS

I am writing this on the long flight home from Brazil, just 6 hours into a 16 hour haul. Given that air travel shoots my Ecological Footprint from eco-heroine to eco-hog, from the decency of a Northern European to the gas-hog habits of North America, I have wondered often in this trip if it is my last. I am considering going on an airplane fast for a year and with oil prices rising, by the end of that experiment I might not be able to afford the flight, even if the planet could.

As with all my inner and outer conversations about resource constraint in the future, I've gotten a lot already just by contemplating life after air travel. I have actually lived through the air travel boom. My first flight was when I was about 7 years old. I was dressed in MaryJanes and white gloves and a dress with a white peter pan collar. It was elegant to fly. My first trip to Europe when I as 16 was on a Flying Tiger prop plane left over, I was told, from WWII. It took nearly a day and we had to stop for fuel in Iceland. Today that flight takes about 6 hours. The next time I went to Europe at 19 for a year of study in Spain, I went on a student ship which took, I believe, around a week - but what a week. We partied and had classes and flirted and by the end of the journey I had new friends and a boyfriend. Not bad. Several years after college, I took my Great American Road Trip with guy, dog and van which became the Great American Alternative Life with "back to the land" living and spiritual exploration and deep inquiry into the cultural and political norms and community. For 20 years I didn't fly. Then YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE came out and off I went again into the wild blue yonder, flying so much that for a while I had United Airlines Elite status. So flying became a habit. Leaving the earth's surface in an aluminum sausage at first felt like that early experience of luxury, but became a norm. So it is within my life experience that airplane travel is rare and special - and traveling the globe is possible without leaving its surface. So returning to Brazil might mean a train to Miami and a boat to Rio. That would likely take 2 weeks. Not 2 weeks of cramped suspension of normal life, but 2 weeks of adventure, relaxation, reflection. Of course that would require a less crammed to the gills life. I think the phenomenal wealth of resources we've learned to transform into daily comforts has given us, rather than the leisure society, the overworked society.

I have gone on about this as I think our imagination about life with less - less oil, less natural gas, less convenience, less variety of ready made products - has become impoverished. We become panicked like a smoker who's run out. We forget that people just like us - and even us - lived 60 years ago with far less and actually had interesting, intellectually stimulating, loving, happy, challenging lives. My father, for example, was the classic 1950's do-it-yourselfer who subscribed to Popular Mechanics and had a full shop in the basement. He built the furniture for my bedroom. He fixed everything. He even assembled from either a kit or a set of plans our first television which had a 5 inch screen with a magnifier in front of it to make the picture big enough for a family viewing experience. If we view the luxuries of highly technological existence as habit and not necessity and recall that less won't mean being bombed back to the stone age but rather put into a situation just 3 generations ago found normal, we might be willing to engage creatively in the changes that are coming due to resource constraint.

Why this meditation on the plane? I am so deeply imbued with the "living well on less" idea - from my mother's depression era training to my rural hunting/foraging/gardening days to my teaching frugality days - that I think about this the way an artist might notice how the afternoon light brings out the ochres. These days that conversation has gone from alternative to mainstream. Less is the order of the day. Of the future. Living in the US we may feel the constraints later than countries that have neither the money nor the military power to commandeer others' bootie much less protect their own from the global piracy called capitalism. On a finite planet, though, logic says even the last man standing eventually falls.

In Brazil there is greater recognition of coming collapse and of the insane strategies being used to delay it. Taxi drivers - the great popular informants about what is really going on - talk of Lula's folly of making a deal with the US to turn Brazil into a sugar cane plantation to feed ethanol into the world's cars. Productive orchards and farms are being transformed into mono crops. Cattle production is being driven deeper into the rain forest so more acres of the earth's lungs are being cut down.

I was surprised by how many end-times conversations I had in Brazil. The three questions are:

How soon will the collapse come?

How many will die?

What are you personally doing?

I think about these things, but do so mostly in secret as the dominant conversation is still so bullish on technology and growth. Even the Ecological Footprint, which is a clear, sharp mirror of our condition of overshoot (using more than the earth can restore), is not inspiring sufficient adaptation and planning. There is a wide gap between what a fair share for every human would be and the tinkering going on in most public and private enterprises.

The general answers to the questions are:

Within five years

Over half of all humans

Moving to rural communities

God, I don't know. As if to underscore the point, though, after writing the above the second film of the 9 hour flight came on. EVAN ALMIGHTY is about an unlikely congressman being chosen by God (Morgan Freeman as God) to build an ark to save us from a flood. Maybe it really is the end of the world as we know it time. Maybe, it is as unbelievable to us that life could REALLY change, that we could REALLY be thrown back on local resources with our current communication and transportation and technology luxuries cut down dramatically by the coming constraints. I've joked with some seriousness that we are in a frantic game of Musical Chairs but can't afford to stop dancing as most of the chairs now have disappeared while we've invited more and more folks into the dance. "Pick your chair" I've said, because soon you're gonna sit down and stay there. I've not so much picked mine as having followed an intuitive trail since getting cancer that landed me in a small village on a semi-rural island. As for timing, my guess has been that we will be in transition for several decades and that life and the global money system are far more elastic and resilient than 'doom and gloomers' would predict. As for die off, yes, I do think global populations will be decimated, though my hope would certainly be that

1. the decrease is through people my age and older kicking the bucket naturally rather than hanging on through resource intensive medical interventions (yes, I do get the implications) and making room for stronger, younger and less addicted to stuff people. and

2. that enough people wake up and change voluntarily in communities to build local arks.

I also found that people who asked these questions were, like me, beyond rage at having this predictable and preventable outcome here upon us and were into a sort of unreasonable lightness of being. Not giddy. Indeed, with much sorrow about the pain ahead. But engaged in the changes, and in opposing further destruction, with love instead of hate.

Well, even though I am probably more vigilant and informed than most on the topic, I am still on an airplane returning from my beloved Brazil.

The final week was 4 back to back lectures, three long interviews (Istoe, the Brazilian TIME, Folha-the NY Times of Brazil and Vidas Simples magazine) and several fascinating meetings.

My primary sponsor was AKATU, a Brazilian organization concerned with conscious consumption, in cooperation with my publisher, CULTRIX. In preparation AKATU did a study linking three values - simplicity, environment and post-materialism (think new cosmology or integral spirituality) - with consumption choices and found that committed to and interested in these values were of conscious consumption - voluntary simplicity, environment and post-materialism (think new cosmology or integral spirituality) - to consumer choices. Their event on Wednesday was very high class wtih simultaneous translation and half a dozen VIPs coming to the stage to welcome and praise and take a bit of credit. Helio Mattar, founder and honcho of AKATU leads a team of several dozen, nearly all women, and his comments on the panel and the event reflected that. He said feminine values were the key to conscious consumption and it was quite by design that women were presenting today. Here was reference to the feminine again, so frequent in Brazil. Was I attracting it? Was it a particularly Brazilian take on the future? Or was it a pointer to some key?

As always in Brazil, we started late but that didn’t blunt people’s openness to a fascinating morning of lectures. Samyra Crespo, President of GreenPeace of Brazil offered the history of the environmental movement and an analysis of the deep ecology vs policy and technology types of consumers. Lia Diskin offered a rousing history of the Universe, Western thought, and perplexities of the science of consciousness. I wound up the morning with a brief overview of the "voluntary simplicity" and YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE, which the Brazilian publisher changed to "Money and Life" (and will hopefully change back with the next edition).

Afterwards i went out lunch with four AKATU employees - yes, all women - and we reflected on what, if anything, feminine values had to do with the transition to conscious consumption. We tallied the feminine values that seem so important now: household resource managers, nurturers, whole systems thinkers, care, and cooperation. These values can't compete in the masculine world of commerce, ambition, winners and losers - indeed, when imposed through domination techniques they seem to lose their inherent beauty and generosity and become simply different cards in the same game. Then we looked at what ways Brazil itself is feminine - flow, spontaneity, affection, warmth, ease, the capacity accept/include it all. Perhaps this is another reason why the feel of that country is so dear to me.

My thoughts turned to why Brazil – which was also the “new world” exploited by Europe – turned out so differently from the US in spirit. Last year friends pointed out that it’s the difference between the British and the Portuguese. The British were spreading Empire. The Portuguese were getting in, getting the gold and getting out. So you have the difference between Northern and Southern Europe. And then there were the slaves. Brazil has, as with everything else, less inner conflict about that time in their history. In the US we are so wedded to our ideals and our founding documents are nearly biblical to us. Brazil has no such illusions about itself as a nation – it’s culture is where it hangs its hat, and the African influence in Brazilian culture is very well loved.

I did two other talks in Spanish (I’m fluent having lived in Spain), one where no one was around to translate the Portuguese for me. Imagine being on a panel where the audience and other panelists speak a language you can barely understand. Imagine it’s a very animated discussion. The topic is one where you are something of an expert. People in the audience are sharing deep insights. And suddenly the microphone is handed to you for your comments on it all. Good thing I was Brazilian enough by then to just flow with it J.

The final presentation was in a huge downtown theater as part of an every Saturday inspirational seminar where a popular talk show host brings in speakers. Very professional, very fun and very good it was the end of the trip as I was ready to stop!

So now I’m back, still infused with the perfume of Brazil. Boat next year?

And I’m deep into Transition Whidbey. Sign up at http://twhidbey.collectivex.com to see what we are doing.

BRAZIL, BRUNTLAND AND THE POWER OF THE FEMININE

Last night in Sao Paulo I heard Gro Harlem Bruntland speak, invited by the BANCO REAL, a Brazilian bank that is leading the financial institution pack in implementing sustainable development.

For those who don’t know Bruntland’s name, she led the UN World Commission on Environment and Development in the mid 80’s in the search for win-win-win rather than zero sum solutions to economic growth, social justice among a growing population and environmental integrity. They held hearings around the world (not in the US as here there was no support) and published 20 years ago the watershed OUR COMMON FUTURE which brought forth the global conversation about and conversion to sustainable development. She went on to head the World Health Organization and participated in the UN Commission on Global Threats.

I encountered this report in 1989 at the Globescope Pacific Assembly – the first US hearing on it – and it changed the direction of my life. I learned there from the UN and NGO glitterati that the biggest driver of unsustainable development was the level and pattern of consumption in North America, but, given our economy’s addiction to consumerism, that problem couldn’t be touched with a ten foot pole. Yet there I was, in the back row, knowing that Joe Dominguez’s financial program had, for a decade, helped thousands of Americans lower their consumption by 20% and have a better life. I was on a mission!

Needless to say, I was thrilled to have the chance to hear her assessment 20 years later.

Overall, she was firm, clear and determined. Given how deep we are now into unsustainability, I found her measured positive outlook inspiring – if only for the dignity of it.

She started by talking about Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize (in her country) 10 days ago. Gore, she noted, awakened the conscience of the world. The IPCC demonstrated what a respected international institution, working steadily for years across boundaries and cooperatively, can do in creating change. She seemed to be saying need morality, good science and resolve to change in these times of threat.

She then reviewed other recent Nobel Peace winners – Wangaari Mathai, Shirin Ebadi and Mohammed Yunus – pointing out that now Peace in this world is far beyond simply resolving conflicts, but has to do with environment, human rights and closing the gap between the rich and the poor. Peace is now connected to every issue facing us – they are all connected. She also pointed out that these three laureates mobilized women for peace – and the essential role of women as both the victims of “man-made” crises and the strongest voices for a more whole-system way forward.

She went on to talk about her roles after the WCED. As the head of the WHO she participated in the first global convention on health regarding tobacco. Having worked on both UN and US government consensus documents that involved hours of debate over every word only to have the final reports gather dust, doing nothing to change anything in the short term, I have sworn to never again pour months of my life into such apparently useless palaver. Yet hearing her I saw that work from the view of a woman and bureaucrat who stakes her life and reputation and hope for the future on building institutions with good governance practices that can, over time, with patience and resolve, move the world steadily towards justice and sustainability. I could see that forming commissions, developing clear principles of operation (respect, transparency, fairness and such), developing clear objectives/targets/timelines, engaging the research community in providing high integrity, accurate information, issuing recommendations that are then monitored and hopefully resourced – all of this slowly moves the human enterprise towards comprehensive solutions. In short, I admired and went to school on her maturity, patience and reason.

She told the story of the WHO’s response to SARS. She called the outbreak a ‘sharp, short shock’ and as such it mobilized a collaborative effort across normally competing governments and labs which, in 6 brief months, eliminated the threat. This story showed how human systems, once mobilized to address a clear threat, are capable of miracles.

In her view, Global Warming is such a whole system shock that must be addressed. It creeps upon us so response has been too little by a very long shot, but now the sharp short shocks of Katrina and the IPCC report and the Stern Report and the rapidly melting glaciers and ice caps has the world on alert. She recounted her work on Global Threats that showed that there is no such thing as an isolated threat anymore – that terrorism for America is not isolated from starvation or environmental refugees or droughts. We are in an interconnected world and Global Warming is the perfect expression of how we need shared solutions to this biggest threat to our collective survival.

She recounted as well the story of smokestacks in the industrializing UK. Health officials showed how the smoke was affecting the health of the villages around factories so they solved the problem by building taller smoke stacks. The villagers’ health improved… however the downwind countries like Norway were now feeling the effects. A great deal of debate and demands and denials ensued until the science minister told Margaret Thatcher that beyond a shadow of a doubt the downwinder’s claims were correct. She could no longer assert the science was equivocal and not be caught with her knickers down. Soon she promised to reduce sulfur by 30%. In other words, Bruntland was showing us again and again how solid science coupled with consistent pressure from public and private sectors coupled with democratic processes can and will solve our problems.

But, she absolutely added, we haven’t a moment to lose. What is now different is that we know that we have a global warming problem. That debate is over. Even Bush, she said, has changed some of his tune this last year (though with great restraint she did not add “but not enough by a long shot”). So we must mobilize the world community to face this threat while strengthening democratic institutions.

On the face of it, this was nothing new, nothing bold, nothing dramatic. But as a wise global grandmother she was taking us all by the ear and sending us upstairs to wash our faces of lies and clean up our dirty hands (our actions).

THE RETURN OF THE FEMININE

This message so resonated with insights I had over the weekend in Florianopolis. Three days ago I engaged in an all-night ceremony with musicians and singers chanting and praying and seeking visions for their lives, supported by the most amazing lightening and thunder storm that sent buckets of purifying rain down upon the hut we were in. Pachamama, Mother Earth, they said, was calling us. The phrase “longing for limits” came to me in the night as I contemplated the very global, interconnected and seemingly out of control problems that Bruntland feels we can address through good science, good governance and good will. Our Western Enterprise looked to me like children – boys mostly – out of control on a playground, exhausting themselves, engaging in ever more destructive games, sensing danger but unable as a gang to stop themselves. A sort of Lord of the Flies scenario but instead of sticks and stones we are playing with weapons and wealth and carving up the spoils of the earth while ignoring the obvious longer term consequences. Deep inside, like spent children, we know we have to stop but as long as the frenzy continues, stopping seems more dangerous than keeping on. I could see that the mature feminine – the mother or grandmother – needs to bring her full compassion coupled with stern rebuke, saving the boys from their mounting violence by telling them they must stop, come inside and go to bed. Now! Some aspect of humanity must call a halt to the dangerous games and men in gangs are notoriously unable to stop themselves from collective evil that no one of them would ever commit on his own. Mob violence unleashed. Only the grandmothers – the mature feminine – can call these boys to account. Only the grandmothers can forgive them their excesses – knowing they themselves are heartsick, spent and lost - while making them face the consequences and clean up their damage.

Many these days recognize that the feminine – be it in women or men – is the antidote to the hyper-masculine domination of the earth and her peoples. Women are finding in themselves new strength to confront the wrongs without vengeance or fear. Women are finding their voices, singing sweetness as well as saying in no uncertain terms what must be done. Women are exercising the power of the mature feminine, unmovable yet full of love. Women are the creators and preservers of life. They care for the family. The steward the resources so all the children flourish. They are wired for whole system thinking and connectivity – the very qualities that Bruntland in her own way both demonstrates and calls for. The woman knows how to hold, contain and constrain with fair, no nonsense love. I could feel in myself, in this most warm and feminine place – Brazil – a call to be in my own way a grandmother to my rowdy tribe of guys. And I got from the gathered group a profound reflection of this same energy I carry – of warmth, compassion, love and clear calling to account. These don’t feel like marching orders. These feel like rocking orders. Like gathering in with love those I might touch through my words and actions, making them safe and also making them look at, mourn and correct the messes we’ve made.

OTHER CONVERSATIONS

The evening before this powerful ritual I spoke to a dozen people about consumerism and the YMOYL approach to recovering from this powerful addiction. These days, as I pay more attention to the complex issues around Peak Oil, I see how oil has been our binge food of choice. It has enabled this massive expansion beyond our social and biological limits. I used to see credit cards - unsecured debt - as the biggest enabler of excess but I now see below that the gush of oil through the human enterprise and of course, the ideology of 'freedom as no limits' as key components.

A fascinating dialogue ensued between a sociologist and an Earth Mother artist woman. It was about Bolivia. In his view, a social and political approach is needed to the wealth gap to lift the poorest people out of poverty. He cited Bolivia where apparently the poverty is comparatively profound. He had statistics to prove it. The artist, who had traveled extensively in Bolivia, begged to differ! In her view, the subsistence way of life there supported rather than inhibited people's survival. To her, the culture was rich, the communities strong. To him, infant mortality was high and diets were restricted. It showed me again how our worldviews influence our strategies for 'fixing' what is clearly going wrong globally. Were these people my artist friend saw as rich impoverished? It reminded me of my first trip to Latin America when I had an opportunity to take take a journey with a shaman in Ecuador. A sociologist would have judged his family and tribe in the worst condition possible - all sleeping on one platform bed in a hut without walls, the children dirty, the women clearly serving men who lounged around 'doing nothing.' Yet within the space of the ceremony was the richest, more lavish experience of the divine one could ever imagine. One way I resolved that incongruity - and still do - is to ask myself, an educated and relatively well off westerner, to use my knowledge, capacities, intelligence, skills and connections to make sure the way of life the Achuar prefer continues to be available to them. To make sure they have the money to send representatives for their interests to international meetings, to make sure their stories are told in ways that bring respect and protection to them. And all the while, making sure i am open to what they have to teach me so that my life can be ever more beautiful and useful and humble.

Then, on my way back to Sao Paulo from Floripa I was stuck in the airport waiting for two hours, fortunately by a young man who spoke flawless English. He's a middle class Brazilian who has taken to studying and playing the stock market to better himself - a real critic of central government planning (that's spelled corruption, by the way) and a real booster of the free market's capacity to create wealth and well being. He gave as an example iron mining in Brazil, a major extractive industry. He criticized the locals for their resistance to the big corporation engaged in mega extraction. If they aren't getting enough money, well, it's their leader's fault for filching it, not the corporation's fault since they are being quite generous with the local people. I told him two stories from my own experience. First, how the American military, when negotiating treaties with Native Americans, had to first rearrange the Indian's culture of decision making since they had no leaders who were empowered to negotiate with the hierarchical army - they decided as a community using consensus. Eventually the army had to find those in the tribe most willing to sell the others out for a price, name them chiefs and having them sign papers that held up in hierarchical American courts of law. And so the West was lost to those who lived there. The other was how tribes in Ecuador are successfully resisting the oil companys' claims on the oil under their parts of the jungle. To whom do resources belong? To the people who live in the land, or to corporations with money to exploit whatever resources there are wherever they are? The young man smiled at both stories. "Of course you are right" he said. Here again are the clashes of cultural norms that reveal very different stories about fairness and the good life. I am ever with the question of a way forward that has integrity.

IN SAO PAULO
These next few days I will give several talks in and around Sao Paulo to large groups of people. I now have copies of the Portuguese translation of YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE in hand; it is beautiful … and I can even read it. I hope to mobilize my masculine capacity to make waves with my feminine capacity to make hearts melt – we shall see.

Plans A and B at Visao Futuro

Plans A and B in paradise

I am sitting on the veranda that surrounds the dining area here, feeling the peace of the air, the rolling landscape, the pond with the windmill. Murals of a jungle paradise are painted on the walls where the food is served – vines, flowers, animals and if you look, a small person as much a part of the landscape as the colorful birds. The columns holding up the tiled roof are wound with bright mosaics of vines and flowers. Paradise.

But wait. The water catchment pond where the windmill lazily turns is half empty. Yesterday we had a brief thundershower, but not enough. It’s been dry here for far too long. The rains usually begin in august. Now it is October. And its hot. The pond reminds me that this exquisite retreat center that has awakened the hearts of probably thousands of Brazilians depends on the rains. The climate. Has enough of the rainforest been taken down to affect the weather here, far, far away? Amalia da Souza who works with Global Greengrants is here again (we shared a room last time I was here) and she confirms that the American appetite for biofuels (enabled by a deal between Lula, formerly the champion of the workers, and Bush) is turning so much cattle land into crop land that cattle ranching (for McDonald’s burgers) is encroaching further into the jungle. No, she said, it is not anywhere near a tipping point, but the destruction continues.

Susan Andrews, the visionary and source for this whole center, told me as we talked about the underpinnings of the global economy, that she and her staff are thinking about Plan A and Plan B. Plan A is that everything continues more or less working over the long haul. It simply acknowledges that no matter how bad the signs and signals of ecological or economic collapse, both nature and financial markets are far more elastic than we can imagine. In Plan A, people from all over Brazil still drive and fly, still have disposable income, still come here for restoration and spiritual education. The rains still come, the students still come, everything works. But they are now developing Plan B. In Plan B oil production diminishes year by year, disrupting the basics of the industrial way of life. With transportation more expensive, people’s livelihoods and lifestyles become more local and possibly more difficult, time consuming and closer to the bone. Global financial institutions and money flow is disrupted. In that scenario, this center might be less a retreat for city dwellers and more of a survival unit for the people in this area. I can look around and see that here as well. The dormitories become living quarters. Some of the meeting rooms become production factories for necessities – cloth, rope, clothes, building materials, etc.

When I met Susan at the airport just two days ago, she was returning from Fortaleza where there is a VisaoFuturo center and also where Neem trees grow. The Neem tree is knows for its many uses, including medicines. Vandana Shiva has taught us all a great deal about this tree as it is crucial to village life in India yet it is being patented (not sure the status of this fight). Susan is increasing the production here of Aryuvedic medicines, as this treatment system is part of her teaching. Growing the Neem tree works in both Plans A (this becomes an Aryuvedic teaching, treatment and medicine center) and Plan B, these medicines are used to treat those who live here.

While my friends and I don’t talk that much about it, I do think about plans A and B for where I live, Whidbey Island. Plan A would be business as usual – a growing tourist and commuter economy, a shrinking agricultural economy, land prices increasing as more and more people with wealth buy up retirement and second properties, young people moving off ‘the rock’ to seek their fortunes elsewhere because housing gets ever more expensive, a place known for the arts where artists can little afford to live… you know, the development story everywhere. In the midst of that, people like me will create home based businesses using their minds and their technology to create value for others scattered around the world. The arts will flourish because every other person sings or acts or dances or writes poetry. In Plan A, all the relocalization efforts we engage in will, of themselves, add value. More gardening means more fresh food means more health. More local currency and local businesses and local exchanges will weave tighter the bonds of community. More bicycles and solar electricity and heating and wind power will mean more health and self sufficiency. More catching water from roofs in cisterns to water gardens will mean protection for limited island water supplies. None of our efforts will be wasted and life for those who pay attention to these shifts to “less, local and love” will simply have more wonderful lives. Plan B will for a while look like Plan A, but eventually be necessary, not just nice.

And that is it for today. My lecture went famously this morning. I am now officially half Brazilian as everyone has welcomed me into this softer more loving culture with open arms.

Visao Futuro - Dreaming the Future Center Brazil

I am at Visao Futuro again and feeling so at home in many ways. Greeted by a soft, spacious landscape, friends from past years, some familiar routines and discovering that somehow my Portuguese has ripened even while on the shelf and I can speak and understand far better than practice would predict.

This is a rural yoga/meditation/spiritual education retreat center about 2 hours from Sao Paulo, drenched in natural beauty and the years of love invested by the founder, Susan Andrews, and the staff and the maybe thousands of students who've refound themselves here. Susan and I met 'by chance' on a ferry when she was attending a future visioning events in Seattle nearly 10 years ago and we created a sisterhood in that short water crossing. We are the same age and bent - passionate about spiritual/social transformation. Her path post Harvard led her to India and PK Sarkar, a guru in the tantra tradition and social philosopher (google PROUT). After his passing she was inspired to live and teach in Brazil and create what he called a Master Center, a self sufficient rural, ecological and spiritual community - what we might call and ecovillage.

Engaged as I am in "relocalization" - imagining a flourishing future with less oil and therefore more local production of "the good life" - I am looking with new eyes at this center. The teaching of profound spiritual truths here happens as much via the arts as it does via traditional spiritual practices. There are always actors and dancing and ceremony and play mixed in with Susan's lectures on biopsychology and principles of yoga and long meditation, yoga and changing sessions. Right now on the lawn in the spring sunlight and heat perhaps a hundred people have just done a patty-cakes game and are now doing a joanna macy exercise.

To decorate for this spring festival (it's the day of the child here in Brazil so the spirit is childlike), they painted old 2 liter pop bottles and then sliced them like peeling an apple in one piece so they hang like bright corkscrew streamers from the trees. A "bulletin board" was made by lashing bamboo poles together with twine (made from coconut shells) and stretching fabric over the frame. Flowered fabric was also cut in strips and has wrapped all the building poles. In other words, an oil-depleted world may be an art-rich world where the leftovers from industrial society become the art materials. While I haven't been to Bali, I am told everyone there is an artist. We humans have had paint and fabric and twine - not to speak of hugging and laughter and games - for thousands of years. We have to remember that easy cheap oil has brought us new and easier ways to do what we have always done - communicate, create, care for one another, grow and harvest food.

The design of this center is also a model of ecological living. They process gray water through purification ponds and reuse it for everything but drinking. They have dug several water cachement ponds to supply the center which hosts a hundred or more people every weekend. Organic gardens grow most of the food we eat and the growing, cooking and cleaning employs dozens of locals who otherwise might have migrated to the favelas of sao paulo to survive. They have photovoltaics and solar hot water. i believe many of the bricks for building were made here.

Ahh, everyone is dancing now towards the next activity. it's a day of theater and play celebrating spring and to the degree i can understand (sometimes I'm helpless but someone will point me right) I will participate.

Ate mais! Seeya soon.

Photos

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

The Lazy Man's Guide to Sustainability

Sustainability seems so rigorous, like scaling a rock wall when you’d rather watch TV. It sounds so virtuous, like passing up bacon, eggs and hash browns for a tofu scramble. It sounds so boring, like having two basic outfits, both black. It sounds so unsexy, like sensible shoes and cotton underwear. It sounds so constraining, like penny pinching and calorie counting and going to AA. Party’s over, now let’s get down to… ugh… sustainability. Not.

Take them trying to pass off “less is more” for what we all in our guts know is the truth: “more is more” and “bigger is better” until you can’t even fit into your elastic waist pants or afford to fill the tank on your monster truck.

Or take their idea of staying home and staying put and living local and having potlucks as a way to save money and energy. Me, I am a Southwest fun-fare junkie. Take me, oh symbol of freedom, to the year-round playgrounds of the planet… to Minneapolis to shop at the Mall of America, to Texas to party during spring break, in winter to Hawai’I for surfing and Colorado for skiing, in August to Paris when the Frenchies have cleared out and left the Champs to us. As long as my credit card holds (the one from Southwest where I earn free trips, whee!) Local is for yokels. Local is taking out the garbage, cleaning house, yard work and work work. Lemme outa here! Oh, did I mention night life? Unless local is the Big Apple, you risk having nowhere to go after midnight in the gazillion bergs and burbs of America.

So less and local sounds like starvation and house arrest.

How about lazy? Lazy sounds good. Lazy is staying home with a beer watching TV. Lazy could even be having no lawn to mow by covering the whole thing with compost. It’s throwing out some lettuce, carrot, tomato and cucumber seeds for salads and zucchini and cabbage and Chewbaca (or is that bok choy?) for some hot veggies, throwing straw over the whole thing, letting the rain come and getting dinner out the door without having to go to the mega market in the mega mall. And it’d be free. I like free. Lazy is buying everything online and having it delivered to the door, never making the effort to drive and shop. Lazy is Netflicks. Lazy is E-bay. Lazy is going over to your neighbor’s house to watch the game, or down to the corner sport’s bar – let them make the Buffalo Wings. Lazy is not buying new clothes for every g’dam wedding, it’s just wearing what you had last year… if it still fits.

Lazy is telecommuting to your desk job – why not, everyone else does it? You don’t shave, work in your PJs and as long you get your assignments in on time, heck, why sit in traffic two extra hours a day to go to an office burning up that friggin’ expensive gas? Lazy is lounging with your kids in bed on Sunday, tickling and giggling, rather than going to Disneyland.

Lazy is forming a car coop so you don’t have to take care of a hunk of steel that spends most of the day sitting around degrading in your driveway – let someone else drive it sometimes and gas it up and take it to the car wash. Lazy is buying food in bulk; less hauling of huge garbage bags of packaging out to the curb or to the dump. Lazy is sharing errands with neighbors – by picking up their photos at the drug store this time, they’ll get your eggs the next. Half the trips. Well, come to think of it, lazy is a digital camera so you don’t even have to take your photos to the drugstore.

Or take electricity – lazy would be getting those curly compact fluorescent bulbs. They last so long you may never have to change them. Put some solar panels on your roof and let the sun handle your electricity. It’s putting out energy anyway, why not take some of those free rays rather than paying a bundle for the old rays stored in fossil fuels. It’s called ‘fossil’ for a reason. Very very old. And hard to get. In fact, on sunny days the electric company will pay YOU for your extra electricity – lazy is getting the power company to pay you. Yep. That’s ultra-lazy. Charge up that electric car and have some rays left over. Use that extra income (earned in your pajamas, a big criteria for lazy living) to get someone to double glaze your windows. Or caulk your house. Heck, you could make a quick pot of chili and throw a caulking party and get your friends and neighbors over to help. Community is way lazy – share the work, spare yourself the lonely drudgery of breaking your back doing it all solo. A very lazy dinner might be inviting the neighbors to a pot of chili even if they don’t work. They can bring a salad, dessert and, yes, Buffalo Wings and have a total feast. Eat your heart out, Denny’s, we’re staying home and pigging out. Wait, no, is this what those sustainability loonies call a pot luck? Whatever, if they want to live lazy too, they are welcome to it. Cards anyone?

How limits make life simpler

How limits make life simpler
The American soul longs for liberation. We represent to the world maximum personal freedom – the right to do, say, have and plan what you please as long as it’s not against the law and doesn’t hurt anyone. While this aspiration is sublime for the soul and invigorating for creative enterprise, it’s turning out to have a lot of costs for the body, society, the environment and our global reputation as reckless and rapacious.

Freedom, though, can’t be wrong! It’s too necessary for responding to changing times, for science and technology to flourish, for the sheer joy of existence. Life without freedom is no life at all. If freedom is suppressed, revolutions will come. Freedom will out, like grass that comes up through cracks in the sidewalk and eventually can crack and crumble any binding structure, returning all to nature.

It turns out that the problem isn’t freedom, but our definition of freedom as no limits. “No limits” is actually impossible anywhere but the human mind and spirit. On earth, life is full of limits, and we depend on them for order, predictability, safety, protection, property, sport, art, architecture, cities, marriage, organizations and all the civilizing aspects of human society and personal existence. Natural law, too, depends on limits: gravity and magnetism, for example. Even the limit of death is essential for renewal of life. As intoxicated as we might become when the lid comes off, when we are released from frustrating or debilitating constraints, we actually don’t want a life of no constraints. We want to have a say over which constraints we choose to protect, connect, respect, reject and select in shaping of our personal and community lives.

People who have chosen to live more simply are all about choosing limits. They are free from excess. They know who they are and this truth sets them free. They are free in their relationship because they respect others’ limits. They have a sense of purpose, knowing what freedom is for. On a daily basis they wield limits with discernment. They limit the hours they are wiling to work for money so they have more hours for human fun and frolic. They limit the cost of living by not buying things they don’t need. They limit the intrusion of the commercial world into their homes by turning off the TV and reading, playing games and talking with their family. They limit what they buy from to products with limited toxins and pollutants and exploitation of others in their production. They limit ugliness by living in homes elegantly appointed with that Goldilocks esthetic of not too much, not too little, just right. They limit the cost of gas by buying fuel efficient cars, riding bikes, taking busses, carpooling, telecommuting and walking when possible. They are masters of limits, not slaves of the “more is better and it’s never enough” mentality sold to us by corporations eager to harvest our hard earned dollars for their often unnecessary products.

What do they get for all these limits? Freedom to be blissfully real, authentic, balanced, relaxed and healthy.

In fact, if more people chose to limit excess in their lives, we’d limit war on the planet. When we live beyond our natural means, how else will we keep our way of life going than to take from others’ minerals, oil, timber, labor, etc.? If we want to limit war – and who but the arms dealers wants war for heaven’s sake! – we need to limit our appetites for material excess. We’d also limit the public health problems that arise from toxics in our food, our carpets, our cleaning products, our air, our water and even mother’s milk which, were it tested by the FDA, would be deemed unfit for consumption.

Now of course setting limits isn’t simple at all. It takes sophisticated deliberation and decision making to maximize freedom while minimizing harm to humans and other living things. It takes great honesty in studying and reporting accurately the effects of our actions and making agreements to limit harm – as we have with the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols and eventually the Oil Depletion Protocol which protect life on earth from harm from climate change, ozone thinning and diminishing cheap energy reserves. Limits in fact are the tools grown ups use for morality and ethics and compassion and wisdom. Promising freedom without limits is like crying fire for fun in a crowded theater – a prank that reckless teenagers might find cool but society wisely prohibits. Prisons are one way society protects itself from the dark expressions of freedom: domination, license, predation, taking what isn’t yours.

Simple living is simply ahead of the curve. People who live simply design with limits, cooperate with limits, participate in limit-setting in their household, communities and politics. They are masters of limits the way a black belt martial artist or a skilled doctor or a fine architect are masters of their crafts. Such simplicity is more enjoyable than getting whacked by limits when you transgress the natural and human laws meant to make life exquisitely worth living. Such simplicity is the ultimate expression of freedom.

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.

Brazil - March 13, 2006

Someone once said "it's not over til it's over" and I think that might be true about this trip. I am in the home stretch, with three talks to go, but this weekend of relaxing with a friend of a friend turned out to be a turning point. Rosa Alegria, a futurist and close colleague of my friend Hazel Henderson, was gracious enough to organize a little get together for me - just on Hazel's say so. A 'few friends' turned out to be a lot of people from the advertising, business, publicity and media communities, all very very interested in my views on consumerism, brazil, simplicity, YMOYL and more. I am discovering that there is concern and awareness in brazil about rising consumerism and in some ways it seems more mainstream to express these concerns and seek solutions. As with everywhere Ive traveled outside the US, people feel like the 'kid sister' to the US. EVerything (except Bush, neo-conservatism, globalization) in and from the US looks a little better than anything at home... newer, more sophisticated, more optimal, more intelligent, more of everything leading edge and good and desireable. And so they sell themselves out! Everywhere this óne down'' attitude takes hold, the consumer culture takes hold and people do not know they are abandoning precious cultural qualities for this chance to have the american dream. since there were so many advertising people there, we asked the question, `what if advertising dedicated itself to sustainability/simplicity/cultural integrity`? and what if that could be done and people could still sustain themselves financially? As it happened, the head of the national advertising association was there and perhaps this question will go somewhere.

it has been easily 3 years or more since i have done any concerted YMOYL/Simplicity education and the intense, intelligent interest in what i am saying is pulling it all out of me again. I really love this difficult to define quality that is Brazil, and do sense it is a nation, a set of ecosystems, a people that still has ecological and social room to change for the better. So the interest in the simplicity message is reactivating the activist in me. I am so very cautious feeling, thinking and saying this because how i 'did' activism in the past was exhausting and ultimately in conflict with my deepest sense of well being. I know my personality - a sort of tendency to get flat out engaged when i sniff an exhilerating possibility - and I am seeking a place within to ground that is different from before. all that occurs to me is love and surrender... that i can use my gifts and knowledge without the anxiety and subtle desire to manipulate the world that infected my work before. it is a fine line one must walk to be in this world passionately and wisely... too detached and one can allow the degradation of living systems to persist, yet too impassioned and one can lose both the inner peace and perspective that are the qualities the world needs far more than any one project. I just know now ever more clearly it is not time for me to hang up my spurs and grab my knitting needles and just give sideline advice to younger folk.

After the meeting, Rosa and her friend Oriana White (a psychological researcher and consumer activist) took me to Oriana's beach home 3 hours north of sao paulo. It was so much fun - three high spirited, english speaking (and sometime spanish when the english got too hard for them), mid-life social activist women chattering away in the car, over food, on the beach like the oldest of friends. Sunday morning they went to get a newspaper and checked out EPOCA (like Newsweek for Brazil) to see if my interview had come out... and it did!!! here is a link which will may not work after a bit: http://revistaepoca.globo.com/Epoca/0%2C6993%2CEPT1152830-1666%2C00.html. of course, it is in Portuguese... but know it is a two page very good very respectful and intelligent spread. so here we go again, folks, the media slurping up this message like a cat laps sweet milk. back at the beach house our fantasizing expanded about ways to moderate, redirect, transform brazil's headlong race off the consumer cliff. Rosa and I talked about her being my Brazil çonnection as she knows so many people and knows the ins and outs of reputations, relationships, capacities, etc. Rosa and Oriana are quite determined to get me back... and no resistance from over here in vicki land to that possibility. the book AFFLUENZA is coming out in Portuguese within this year and that would be a great time to do some education on enoughness here in brazil. and of course, with the Epoca article the translation of ymoyl into portuguese just got 1000% more likely.

we also talked a lot about the Conversation Cafes and ways they might use this method here. We talked about what it would take for brazilians to be awake and alert to the subtle good that would be lost if the american dream were to wash completely over this country. the conversation got around to the topic of the CC i did with Jorge Mello and partner Marge in Florianopolis:
what makes brazil brazil?
what makes you a brazilian?
what do you want to see in brazil in 10 years?

Rosa, Oriana and I imagined many conversation cafes on this theme - a Socratic way to get people to name for themselves the invisible - and visible - wealth that is brazil. and in naming it, love it. and in loving it, want to protect it. of course all this was just blue sky thinking under wonderful blue skies - but everything begins with dreams.

Of course another importantissimo aspect of the beach was the beach itself. i spent hours in my beloved warm atlantic ocean playing with the waves, floating gloriously in the sun. in the early morning i meditated and did yoga on a large rock at the end of the beach - as the sun rose in the east, a rainbow grew in the west. one of those mornings when you cannot gulp enough goodness to really anchor it in your soul. everything passes, and there are so many of these gorgeous human and natural moments here in brazil that i just had to let go of as they were knocking my socks off.

I reconnected with Susan yesterday in the airport for the final leg of our journey, and we flew to Uberlandia where I sit today writing this and resting up for tonight's talk. This morning we were interviewed for TV and then went shopping for a more brazilian looking pair of shoes. I cannot tell you how dowdy i feel in my american clothes - as pretty as most of them are. brazilian women wear towering stilleto heals and tight everything with much of the belly and boobs uncovered. and they are by and large so beautiful that you actually like looking at all the flesh. the down side, as Rosa and Oriana told me, is that brazil is becoming the plastic surgery capital of the world and sensible brazilian women think this focus on perfect bodies is all pandering to male chauvinism. in addition, rio is now one of the easy sex capitals of the world. so there is a light and dark side to this natural brazilian beauty. none the less, i got a tasteful pair of sandals with tastefully tall stilleto heels (not 4 inches, more like 2).

Our last talk in Sao Paulo went very well (150 people) and we are now functioning so smoothly as a team. i know her needs and rhythms and style and can weave my presentations around her greater wisdom. and it is just plain fun to have susan for a friend - an impressive spiritual presence with a good sense of humor and a depth of interest in and understanding of the world. we are feasting on this companionship and will likely do more together in the future - at very least for the fun of it. Now that EPOCA has come out, tonight's talk in Uberlandia is sold out with sro and people begging to come. so we will have 250 people waiting for us in just 2 hours.

I am feeling my return coming toward me - and feel ready. Happily I am not thinking I dont want to go back to the US after the luscious love here in brazil... i am thinking how good it will be to dive into rewriting my freedom book, to start seeing how i can contribute to the south whidbey community, to work on the fledgling AFFLUENZA PREVENTION AND TREATMENT CAMPAIGN the simplicity forum is launching this year, to explore some new writing projects, to get back to painting, singing and dancing... and to have the quiet of my home for inner communion as well.

and who knows... there are still three days left and ANYTHING can happen.

Brazil - 10 March, 2006

We are in the home stsretch and I am feeling it. Tonight is a talk in São Paulo, the weekend in free and then Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are talks in Belo Horizonte, Uberlandia and São Jose... and then I get on a night flight to start the long slog home to my little island and to the life that awaits me.

Our talks on Sunday and Monday went quite well, though I had the uneasy feeling that we were two speakers with two messages, not one message with two very different styles of speaking it. By Wednesday's presentation in Joao Pessoa, that flaw showed up in technicolor. Many things were less than wonderful about the situation. The Visao Futuro facilitators had booked an inexpensive hall, but... it belonged to a religious group whose reputation apparently made some people unwilling to come. and it was a cavernous auditorium with 800 seats and a stage 5 feet off the ground with a monumental dais for a panel of speakers that would have fit right in to the old Soviet Union. Intimacy was not easy to create. Plus, about 120 people came who scattered themselves in the auditorium, making it feel creepily empty. My translator was on her maiden translation voyage and so nervous she became stiff, loquatious and often just plain wrong. Neither Susan nor I felt able to spiritually touch the people scattered in the vast emptiness of this hall. there was no bounce, no lift, no light and we both need to feel a connection to connect with the deepest source of speaking.

We processed for several hours this failure with the facilitators, two high spirited women who ended up way down in the dumps. Then we stayed up for another two hours searching for the way through... especially with 6 more talks to go.

So much of what I have relied on for public speaking was missing. I can't make jokes. I can't use slang. I can't feel what is real for Brazilians like I can feel with American audiences. We are sort of locked in to using powerpoint so that if the translator is off at least the slides on the screen are correct - so I can't be spontaneous. I am sharing a time slot barely big enough for me to get it all across... and needing to leave the audience alert and alive enough for susan to have something to work with. In trying to adjust the talks until then, susan had been getting feedback from her facilitators in each place and then trying to steer me into better choices. Each correction seemed to move me further from the ease and intuition i rely on to hit the mark.

what a perfect set up for breakthrough! all we needed was to understand what this wall we hit meant. i staunchly navigated through the dark forest of doubt - and the desire to just throw inthe towel and let her do it all in her charming Portuguese. I settled again and again my ruffled feathers as susan would try to steer me to choices that didn't feel quite right... but what do i know as i am so at sea with the language and culture. i needed her - badly - to steer or i would sink. and I knew that my uneasiness had nothing to do with her... but with being so very challenged on every front, unable to use most of my normal speaking skills. so we sat in this fire of not knowing and the breakthrough came. We searched for the one message - what is true fulfillment - that would link our two presentations. With that key, we each tossed chunks of what we had been doing and massaged what was left. I searched for ways to have my intuition and personality present with the awkward rhythm of pausing every sentence for translation. in that fire we also became more 'one' with one another, more of a team, deeper friends and companions.

AND, the talk last night worked very well. I did little skits and pantomimes to make my points, the translator had a sense of humor as well so could support me in playing with the audience, the setting was perfect, every chair in the auditorium filled (about 250), and the group so happy about the result.

There are some deep teachings in all this... about pulling within for deeper ways of connecting beyond words and culture. I have long felt that i wear my personality like an overcoat - it isn't me, it's what i run around in. But being so stripped in high demand situations with lots of people witnessing my nakedness is certainly a crucible for transformation.

it's time to go for tonight1s talk so, to paraphrase jimmy durante, goodnight mrs calabash and the rest of you reading, wherever you are...

Brazil - 8 March

It is International Women's Day and i am so aware that in the US many of my gender compatriots are very actively bringing women's values, perspectives and basic embracing nature to the fore. Here I've bumped into quite a few expressions of appreciation of women, so I am feeling connected.

I am now in João Pessoa, our third city on our tour. Again met at the airport by loving, smiling faces of people who have taken Susan's courses in the beautiful Visao Futuro ecological park. In a way, our speaking tour is also a tour for her to nourish these budding centers across the country where people who have been inspired beyond belief by the courses are trying to maintain the practices and offer to others a bit of the magic. It is hard, to be sure, so all of our hosts are also problem solving with Susan who holds the whole network and the whole vision in her slim being.

I am daily appreciating more the gift of Brazil to our world. This place is rich in cultural, emotional, spiritual and ecological resources. the very vitality of the land (we are now in the tropics with heat heat heat and lush vegetation) gives the country a sort of young, gonna live forever feeling. the tendency towards happiness here, towards going to the beach rather than at each others throats, is to me a real resource. I think about other places in the world... africa, india, china, even the US... and i see places that are getting used up, heading towards the barren realities of Easter Island. But Brazil still has so much in its original state, and this alone makes be believe that we are on the ascendant continent. the darker realities of our times are not far away, though... global warming or 'something' is changing the climate here. they say it is hotter now and summer is lasting longer. my last city - fortaleza - and this one are bristling with new high rise apartments that look as flimsy as the ones i saw growing nearly overnight all over beijing.

yesterday i stayed in a little beach resort near fortaleza and was treated to a wild dune buggy ride plus a delicious hour in mother ocean. today somehow the local coordinators pulled some strings and i am in a 5 star hotel. i so remember this life... a different city every day, doing media interviews, getting up in front of different people doing the same speech. i am checking in with myself... do i like this anymore? the old missionary zeal is rising as i sense how eager people are for the ymoyl and conversation cafe messages, so we shall see.

gotta go... today it's a date with the sunset.

Brazil - March 7... I think

It has been a wild week since I had access to the Internet, and I only have time for a few short thoughts before going ... ahem... shopping in the middle of this intense tour to alert Brazilians to the dark side of the American Consumer Dream.

Susan Andrews and I have done two talk of the nine scheduled, each time to groups of 200. Her network of facilitators for her stress management/yoga/meditation course... there are well over 100 such around the country... are organizing in every city. They are all so happy to have her - their prime teacher - come to their area so she is the queen here and i the princess getting showered by much second hand love and grace. My Portuguese is rapidly improving and I sometimes even understand everything that people say. Sometimes, though, I only get 50% and the interpretation I derive is often pretty far off. And sometimes I get nothing and am just the happy village idiot, smiling in all the wrong places but somehow endearing. This language opportunity and challenge is a blessing and a curse. Mostof the time I am clueless about where we are going, what we are doing, who is talking to me and why. Surrender is the key. and lots of smiles and hugs and `tudo bom`.

Our messages are getting daily better woven together and the shared presentation - me re ymoyl principles and her re psychobiology/love - fit and really turn people on. and we are having such fun as `girlfriends.`

My 5 days in Floripa were nigh on to eccstatic - my mini vacation between teaching gigs. Ocean. Parties. Dancing. Singing. Drumming. Chanting. Blissing. And even a Conversation Cafe the last night to top it off.... question was... what makes brazil BRAZIL... and/or what makes you brazilian. I learned a lot about this country I am loving more every day.

Lunch now... more to come.