Humanize the Earth!

update on Tip Jar for Shovels and Wheelbarrows

Back in August, I introduced the Tip Jar for Shovels and Wheelbarrows and Such with a goal of $250. I’ve just hit the halfway point! Yes, it’s true that it says 46%, but it’s not counting the $10 I received in person. The shovels and wheelbarrows are for members of the Humanist Movement that live in a Liberian refugee camp in Ghana and are working on a Campaign for Non-violence and Fight Against Malaria.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed so far: Erin, Lars, Julie, Sue, Pam, Nicholas and Anonymous

Wouldn’t you like to be among them? No amount is too small! :-)

Update: John and John bring us now to $155

progress

There, now that wasn’t so bad, was it? I sent out invitations for both the potluck and the weekly meetings. Woo hoo! Yay for me! Now let’s see if I can get any of that packing done. :-)

computer is time-sink

I have a lot I want to do in the world, and often I find that I’m not doing all that because of this computer, the time-sink. It’s not the computer’s fault, of course. It’s something about the way I go about solving problems, or figuring things out.

On my to do list tonight:

1. Pack for Zambia trip, leaving Sunday morning but not much time between now and then.
2. Invite people to my Thursday meeting for tomorrow and following weeks
3. Invite people to the Inviting Friends Potluck coming up on Oct 16th when I get back

What I’ve been doing:

1. Trying to use various tools and methods to get my Outlook email in to my new gmail account. For over 3 hours.

Maybe this blog post will get my rear in gear!

My first experience abroad

My first experience abroad was going to Italy (I grew up in the Detroit-area, went to school in New Jersey and have been in Chicago ever since school) in 1996. I was going through a really rough time in life, treating people badly and all-around just being miserable in all areas of life (work, partnership, friends, etc.).

My friend Zoe invited me to go camping in the south of Italy with the Humanist Movement from Milan. I was so down emotionally that it never occured to me to be scared. On the airplane I had a moment of panic hearing people speak Italian to each other. “I don’t speak a word of Italian. Not ‘Yes.’ Not ‘No.’ What have I gotten myself into?!!”

I managed to get myself by bus from the airport to Zoe’s flat, napped and spent a couple of hours exploring Milan before our overnight train to Briatico in Calabria. The sights, sounds and smells on that train were totally amazing. People sleeping everywhere made navigation to the washroom an adventure!

Camping itself was also really amazing and nothing like what I’d experienced in the US. There were hundreds of tents pitched quite close together within short walking distance from the Mediteranean. Lots of time at the beach each day, kicking the soccer ball around, throwing a frisbee, swimming or just relaxing. The evenings hours were taken up by a luxurious dinner cooked right there by one humanist team each night. For $9/night/person between 60-100 people ate a 4 course gourmet meal that took hours outside at our camp.

All week long it generally took about 5 or 6 Italians at a time to have a conversation with me because though I’d picked up a few words, I was totaly useless in Italian and that’s how many people it took to collaborate on their side with translations back and forth. What an amazing experience to envy the 3 and 4 year-olds at the camp who “spoke perfect Italian!”

What I remember most about this trip was the human spirit of all those humanists at the camp. They were all so full of life and so encouraging of me and my personal journey, to transform myself into the person that I really wanted to be, who could act in the world to make it a better place and develop meaningful relationships along the way.

I came back to the US and joined the Humanist Movement right away and to this day see my work in the world as a work of humanizing the earth.

Amazing Night

Just got home a bit ago and am really looking forward to writing about the amazing night I just had.

The last Friday of every month is Critical Mass, a bike ride where we act as if the world we want to live in already exists. We gather. We ride. For one night a month, the car is not in charge, there are enough of us on bikes that we can make the rules, at least for the 5 or 10 minutes it takes us to all roll through any given intersection.

Anyway, tonight’s ride meandered around the loop (Chicago’s downtown) interacting with tons of pedestrians and then headed west and the south, going through the ABLA public housing projects where dozens and perhaps hundreds of children lined the streets to give us high 5s. From there we took over Western Avenue and were greeted by a chorus of semi-truck airhorns. I’m not partial to loud noises, but since they were in our honor, they made me happy tonight. From there we headed east and ended up in Chinatown.

I rode the whole way next to my friend Stephanie tonight. It’s rare for me to ever stay connected with one person for the whole ride because it’s so chaotic and so much is always happening with so many people to talk with, but in spite of all that, we really connected tonight. We’d been swapping email and phone messages recently trying to reconnect after quite an absence, and the ride did that for us tonight. When it was all over, we ran into 3 of Stephanie’s friends from various activist gatherings and protests. The 5 of us locked up our bikes and found a restaurant and I was introduced to the two I hadn’t met before (Lucky & T) and became reacquainted with the one I do know (A).

A told us about how he hasn’t used a social security number in over 15 years. He’s been hitchhiking and riding freight trains to get around to all kinds of protests and support for activists as well as what he calls Food for Body, Mind and Spirit. He finds, and makes available to others, free food to eat. He spends time reflecting and time singing and connecting with the divine (I can’t remember his eloquence and for that I apologize). I asked if anyone had documented this gift economy in action and was not surprised to hear that no one had.

Lucky told us about living and working in community (St. Francis Catholic Worker) with people that are down and out. Her organization manages to take care of all the needs for about 15 people for less than $20,000 per year. Granted, the house is paid for, but still, we’re talking property taxes, electricity, water, transportation, food, everthing. It helps that all of their food is donated from organic farms or restaurants or food pantries, but they’re not a 501(c)3 because they don’t want to interface very much with the government. They don’t take corporate or church funding either. Amazing.

After dinner we went back to our bicycles and A brought out his mandolin. We all sat on a the ground and listened as he sang protest songs of the modern movement for something new in the world. I felt my heart open to this small circle and to circles of human beings everywhere as well as all the connections that exist in the universe. Early on in the singing we were joined by some Spanish-speaking men. They so enjoyed the music that one of them dropped $5 in A’s case before he left. I felt as if I was experiencing a small piece of how the universe provides for A and how he doesn’t need a system job the way the rest of us do (of course he’s as dependent as the rest of us on the system as his dumpster dinners wouldn’t be there without the system, nor would his friends’ apartments for which they pay rent and where they allow him to sleep on the floor).

The evenings experience all around felt very whole and very connected with the future of the human being that so many of us are engaged in building.

Gmail invitations

I have 6 Gmail invitations (from Google, with 1000MB of storage). I’ve been using it to archive my mail for the past couple of weeks and am surprised with how fast it is. They’re still supposedly testing the system so haven’t opened it up for anyone to sign up yet. I got my invitation from ChicagoFreeCycle.Org so plan to give 4 of the invites back to that community. The other 2 I’ll give to anyone reading here that would like one and posts in the comments here, no strings attached, but it’d be great if you’d tell us what you’re most passionate about, especially related to personal and/or social change. Thanks!

12. The Principle of the Accumulation of Actions

Sharon, John, Gerry and I looked at The Principle of the Accumulation of Actions tonight:

“Contradictory or unitive acts accumulate within you. If you repeat your acts of internal unity, then nothing can stop you.”

Very interesting theory discussion about how we become deadened to the contradictions when we continue to repeat them; also about how tensions begin to feel like being “alive” and thus when we relax, at first it feels like death.

We also shared some personal examples of feeling a tension in the chest when doing non-work-related stuff at work when it’s just procrastinating (not the same as guilt) vs doing something that actually builds the future, even if not strictly work-related (can still be unitive as long as there’s no guilt). Other examples were around inner process to decide if changing jobs for more security but giving up freedoms really makes sense.

How does this one strike you?

Zambian blog

As I said, I’m off to Zambia in October. I just found this blog of a foreign NGO worker in Zambia: 360 degrees of sky.

BugMeNot.com

There’s a new image at the bottom of my blog that will take you to bugmenot.com, a site that will get you into free registration websites (like the NYTimes or ChicagoTribune) without having to register. Or if they don’t have a login for a particular site, you can create a fake login and give it to bugmenot.com so they can give it away. Cool.

The small Change News Network

Michael Herman’s GivingMarket idea from the Giving Conference has grown into the The small Change News Network

• What do you want (for the common good)?
• What do you already have to offer?
• What do you need from some others?
• What are you willing to do with it?

Look for my answers to these questions here soon, but please go check out the sCNN in the meantime.