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Happy Monday!

Today is “Memorial Day” in the United States. What are we remembering?

Last month I heard the artist Claudia Bernardi speak about her work creating community murals in Argentina, El Salvador and Guatemala. The murals are memory projects of massacres. Made in places where violence is buried in the soil and in the bodies and minds of the living.

Seth Mydans recently wrote in the New York Times about Cambodia, “Beyond the question of age, ignorance about the past appears to be a combination of culture and policy and perhaps also the passivity of a people too exhausted by history to confront its traumas.”

Are we exhausted by history?

“Some older people get so upset at their children for not believing that they say, ‘I wish the Khmer Rouge time would happen again; then you’d believe it.” (NY Times)

Do we really need to repeat atrocities?

How can we expect a child to comprehend that more than 1.7 million people were systematically murdered in a four-year period? As adults we still struggle to make sense of this human horror – and Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Rwanda, the Holocaust, and more. The list continues today, and some would say we are living genocide against ourselves and planet earth on a daily basis.

We dance between forgetting and remembering.

Claudia Bernardi told us about working in a community where some of the members denied that the violence ever took place. How do you create something together when such opposing views are held? When some are denying the reality of what occurred?

They agreed to paint a mural of what the town was like “before” without defining what happened to change the “before.”

What do we choose to remember and what do we choose to forget?

Substitute, “War” with “Peace.”

“Let no neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.” – from the Memorial Day Order

and

“I live about a mile from Hangman Valley, near Spokane, Washington, and thrice that far from Fort George Wright Drive, one of the city’s arteries. Prior to Colonel Wright’s tenure in this city, Hangman Valley and the creek that runs through it were known as Latah, which means in the native tongue ‘stream where little fish are caught’.

At the time, 1858, whites had not been able to bring all of the region’s Indians to terms. Then Wright had an idea. Under a flag of truce he called the Yakama warrior Qualchan and his wife to Wright’s residence, telling them he was going to proffer a peace treaty. Having already put Qualchan’s father in chains, Wright arrested Qualchan, led him directly to a tree and with Qualchan’s wife as witness hanged him….

The road, which I drive often, remains named in his honor.”

- Derrick Jensen (from A Language Older Than Words, pg. 45)

Happy Monday!

I went to a fundraising dinner on Saturday night where more than $45,000 was raised in less than 10 minutes.

I also went to the mall on Saturday to buy a top to wear to the dinner. The mall was Christmas-time packed with long lines in every store I entered or walked by.

Even in “these economic times,” there is money. People are buying things they want and giving to causes they care about.

There was no lamenting over the economy during the dinner program. Every speaker focused on core mission and impact.

Personal stories were shared highlighting:

1. the need/problem
2. the solution
3. what had been accomplished so far (because of our support)
4. the continuing need
5. how this need was going to be met (with our support)

Given the challenge “Are you in?” from a dynamic speaker, the stage was set for the fundraising ask. And people responded. $10,000, $2,500, $1,000, $500, $100, $25 gifts were enthusiastically made and gratefully received.

There is money. We might not be raising as much as we did last year – but people are still willing to give.

Adjusting to change, especially change we don’t particularly want and didn’t ask for, can be difficult. We can become myopically focused on what used to be or what we wish was.

Babysitting for a friend this week, I watched her five-year-old daughter dissolve into total misery when she couldn’t have what she wanted. We were eating lunch and she had her food, but wanted it in a blue bowl (which her sister had.)

She became fixated on what she didn’t have, refusing to eat. All she could see was the blue bowl she wanted – not the food that was in the purple bowl she had.

We’re like this sometimes. We focus intently on what we can’t have or what we wish we had and stubbornly refuse to enjoy what we have because it’s not exactly what we wanted (or what we see that someone else has.)

The person who led the giving spree came by our table afterwards feeling discouraged. “I didn’t get any gifts at the $5,000 level.”  Focused on what wasn’t received, he was disappointed.

When the need is great, we can easily slip into seeing only what is lacking. Step back for a minute. What is in your bowl?

Substitute “There is no money” with “There is money.”

“Our results confirm a survey completed in January by the Chronicle of Philanthropy that reported that more than 52 percent of people who donated in 2008, would donate the same as they did in 2008 and only 17.5 percent said they would give less. Thirty percent were uncertain. What this means to all of us, is that most people continue to be caring and altruistic even when times are tough.”

- Jamie Inman, Development Director for the YMCA of Greenville

and

“Just as during the Great Depression, when Americans doubled the amount they donated to charity, individuals are picking up the slack left by floundering foundations.”

- Kristen Moulton from The Salt Lake Tribune

Happy Tuesday!

My mom said to me this past weekend, “How many times are you going to have to do this?” as she watched me cutting fruit for the Frisbie St. Art show.

Her question reminded me of how often we live in the future instead of the present. How often our thoughts and actions reflect a belief in the myth of “The End.”

We create a finish line and then focus our attention on it.

“Once this is over…”  “When this is done…” “After this happens…”

In our minds we are always heading toward completion. What is valued is the task being over – not the task itself. Our actions are performed for some future fulfillment.

And do we ever arrive? At “The End?”

I never have.

Life is in continual motion.

Our daily lives are made up of countless activities we perform over and over – sex, cooking, taking a shower, going to the bathroom, reading email, writing a fundraising letter, meeting with a donor, talking with a friend on the phone, washing the dishes.

I don’t mind cutting fruit. I like preparing for an event and watching how numerous little steps knit together to create a temporary experience.

So it is with everything.

Can we enjoy the process?

Substitute, “Once this over…” with “Now.”

“Expansion and positive change on the outer level is much more likely to come into your life if you can enjoy what you are doing already, instead of waiting for some change so that you can start enjoying what you do.”

-  Eckhart Tolle (from A New Earth)

Happy Monday!

What are you waiting for?

I’m in the midst of preparing for an art exhibition opening this Friday that I organized with 15 artists. The show is in my 1.5 bedroom apartment in Oakland, CA – a rental. One of the places where we normally think, “I’m just renting.”

Meaning: we don’t want to invest because it’s not permanent; it’s not “ours”.

We have come to equate owning with permanency – even as the seasons and cycles of life teach us again and again that almost nothing is permanent and that owning is no guarantee. Change is more constant than forever.

A friend said to me this week, “You are fearless.”  And I quickly corrected her. “No, not fearless, just moving with my fears and doubts.”

I am aware with every step I take that I may “fail” (whatever that means, who defines failure?) and there is often the thought, “What am I doing? This is crazy.”

What propels me forward?

I have let go of perfect. I have let go of waiting for external or internal realities to conform to my (or society’s) script of what needs to be.

It is easy to focus on everything that might go wrong and never take a step.

Don’t wait for perfect – dive in where you are and swim with your fears.

Substitute “Perfect” with “Beautifully Alive.”

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

- Voltaire