Mama says NO!

What part of no do you not understand??


The usual format is to begin each blog with a quote.  In fishing around for one, I could not come up with any better than the standard one exasperated mothers ask their children, especially teenagers, on a regular basis.  No, only two little letters, packs a wallop.  Used negatively, it can and does curtail dreams and growth.  Unfortunately, that is what is most associated with this word - the thwarting of a desire.  It is something that we chafe against.  Yet it is a very powerful word.  Young children learn it early and use it to assert their independence, separateness from others.  No, mine, me all define the self.  Here I am.  No. 

No is empowering when used to set our boundaries.  A study out of the Mayo Clinic+ says that no can be a great stress buster.  Not only is it not selfish but actually healthy for you to say no to requests that do not serve your best interests.  It is not fair to others to always say yes when you are not really committed to what you have just agreed to.  It also prevents the best person for the job from stepping into the gap that you are halfheartedly filling.  Before saying yes, reflect on what your priorities are, how much effort is this going to require from you or how much you are being motivated by guilt. And then when you mean no, just say it - no thanks - briefly, unapologetically, respectfully, honestly, assertively leaving no doubt in either your mind or the other person's and then move on and be ready to stand on your no. What part of no, do you not understand?

Some nos are just that, a simple no.  Some nos are NOS and demand unwavering action.  Such is the case with what is happening with the Shuar people in the Morona-Santiago province of Ecuador as they prepare to wage a battle to the death for their ancestral homeland.  That is a formidable no.  In case, you do not recognize the name Shuar, they are the "head shrinking" Amazon tribe.  In addition to their storied reputation, they are the only unconquered tribe in the Americas, never having surrendered or signed a peace treaty.  Not that they haven't had the opportunity.  The list of would be conquerors includes the Incas, Spaniards as well as the governments of Peru, Ecuador and the United States.  With their tradition of severing the heads of their slain opponents, removing the skull and shrinking the head by boiling it to create what they call Tzantza, they are fierce warriors, something on which they pride themselves.  

Interestingly, they fight to protect peace.  To them, war is necessary to ensure that the jungle is a peaceful place for all of it inhabitants - the plants, the animals, the rivers, even the insects.  Peace that is not inclusive of all is not true peace. Their latest battle concerns the rich resources on their land to which Ecuador has sold the mining rights to foreign powers. The Shuar people have been on this land since before the time of Christ and see the protection of it as their sacred duty.  They are very clear as to what their 'no' is about: the land was not the government's to sell, they will not give up their traditions to work in the mines, they will not let this land be polluted from the results of the mining.  For any of this to happen is death anyway; not just for themselves, but for the land that they are charged with protecting as well.  And so they will fight to the death to save this forest that has provided for them so well over the centuries using the ancient method of their ancestors - the spear.  Not just the men but the women and the children will fight as well for their land and the right to live as they wish.

What is fascinating about this is not just the intensity of their no but how centered it is and how reflective of their culture.  Gender roles are very strongly defined and are balanced between the men and the women.  The men's role is to cut down trees for boats and houses, hunt animals and kill other men when necessary.  Sons leave their homes of origin when they marry and go to the house of their father-in-law and come under his leadership.  Women tend the gardens, prepare the food, raise the children.  Daughters when they marry stay in their birth home with their families so that the work can be spread among many female hands.  While this may sound traditional, here is the key:  women have the authority to tell the men to stop - enough trees have been cut, enough animals have been hunted, enough people have been killed - to prevent them from destroying nature.  And so these "savages" live in harmony with their land in a sustainable manner, taking only what they need and defending it with warfare only to preserve that harmony.  

I pause to let that sink in - the fierceness of their nature to defend and destroy is balanced by the word no that is respected and listened to.  Obviously, they do understand all parts of no.  How different would the "civilized" world be if we listened to a well reasoned no, enough, stop.  I have often wondered how much is enough - is your first billion enough? How about your second?  Has enough concrete been laid down for subdivisions?  Isn't unregulated growth cancer?  What is our definite no, enough is enough?  We are unsustainable, out of control and yet we are hell bent on more.  
It is time for the older women to step forward and say very firmly - NO!  STOP!  ENOUGH! - to take a page out of Code Pink co-founder, Medea Benjamin's book.  This anti-war group has taken to crashing Congressional hearings to gain attention for their causes.  As Benjamin quips, "You can get away with a lot as an older woman."*

And so as someone who has already committed the unpardonable sin of getting older, who lacks the good sense to color my gray hair and to have work done to fix this atrocity, I say NO, ENOUGH to the following: 

• War and more dead people and devastated lands.  No mother should have to endure what Cindy Sheehan has in believing that her son who was killed in the Iraqi war died for nothing. Her politics aside, what horrified me most about Sarah Palin was her glib off hand remark at the Republican convention where she handed over her bright new penny of son to the horrors of war.  If the restraining hands of mothers who have borne the children and nurtured them no longer holds then we are all lost.
• Fracking, the horrible rape and pillaging of our lands and waterways for the hopes of a false economic boom when more sustainable, less damaging to the environment alternative forms of energy are available.
• What Economist John Perkins calls "predatory capitalism" as espoused by Milton Friedman in the notion that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits without regard for the consequences to either human life or the environment. 
• Sexual abuse and the marginalization of any person due to race, gender or creed.

Interestingly, the new Pope Francis from South America is raising his voice and saying no.**  Could it be that we are finally awakening to the fact that commonsense needs to prevail once again if we are to survive ourselves and our greed?  If not heeded, we are doomed.  So like the Shuar people of Ecuador, I am sharpening my weapon of choice, my pen, and stand ready to defend my no.  As suggested by the Mayo study, I have weighed the consequences, determined the costs and believe me, there is no guilt involved, just resolution.
NO MORE!   ENOUGH!  CEASE AND DESIST!



*Time Magazine, September 13, 2013, Photo-Bombing for Peace, Alex Altman

 + Mayo Clinic http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/stress-relief/SR00039

** http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/22/20638292-pope-attacks-global-economy-for-worshipping-god-of-money?lite

And just for fun to show that we older women still have it, here are some gray hairs that have no intention of going gently into that dark night of old-age fashion:  https://www.upworthy.com/what-happens-when-an-old-woman-says-no-to-how-fashion-orders-her-to-be?c=upw1

Suffering Solution: Surrender, Serve, Share

"The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender."
William Booth


To open his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens in the mid 1800 penned the words:

                         It was the best of times, it was the

                         worst of times,it was the age of wisdom,

                         it was the age of foolishment, it was the 

                         epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,

                         it was the season of Light, it was the season of                         Darkness, it was the spring of hope,

                         it was the winter of despair...

His novel concerned the French Revolution, which deposed the French monarchy leading to the establishment of a radical secular democratic republic.  How appropriate those words are today as we witness the crumbling of another democratic republic.  Whether we here in the United States are able to avert the decay and death of civilizations that underpin German historian Oswald Spengler's belief that democracies eventually morph into plutocracies depends upon how willing we are to get over our victimhood and our national pastime of suffering.  Yes, we the people do have the power BUT only if we have the willpower to move beyond our love of suffering whether it be physical, mental or psychic.  We find it so much easier to blame someone else or the government for our shortcomings and pain than to take the responsibility for ourselves and to get on with it.  Yes, I hear you whining - how am I one small person suppose to change the government.  It is not about changing anything other than yourself.  While in the long run that will require harder work than changing the government, the ramifications are more far reaching and effective in establishing a sustainable status quo for all and in that process gaining happiness for you.

The recession has hit us hard particularly the middle class. The average American household has recovered only 45% of the wealth that was eroded with the recession.*  While the middle class struggles, the elites have gained ground setting the stage for Spengler's prophesy to come true. Many feel that there is no real hope for the middle class especially following the dim statistics coming out of the U. S. Census Bureau: the nation's real median household income was unchanged in 2012 at $51,017 compared to $51,100 in 2011, adjusting for inflation.  All indications show that Americans at the income midpoint are not doing as well as they were in 2007 before the decline.

Mirroring these dismal statistics is the increasing number of working mothers who are burning out according to Katrina Alcorn's book, Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink. So if dual incomes are not a viable answer to this dilemma of vanishing wealth, then how do we regain a more equitable footing for all?  I think the optimal word in that last sentence is the word "wealth." I purposefully selected that word instead of money or income because wealth encompasses so much more than just our finances.  Wealth of life is something that is available to all of us and a gift that we allow ourselves regardless of where our finances happen to be at any given moment.  The abundance and joy of life lies within each of us.  By getting over our "woe is me" and our entitlement expectations that cause us to look outside ourselves for the answer, then we can begin to empower ourselves.  I believe that is the reason for all the lemons that are cropping up.  It is a huge collective wake-up call to quit our whining and to take a serious look at where we are and how we got here.  

The path that we were on was totally unsustainable.  The system is broken and only we can fix it, one person at a time.  So let the elites and the government stagnate in their muddling around at "fixing" the economy, which in reality results in the haves getting more at the expense of the majority.  Because let's face it, in today's world big business and government are one and the same, just look at the revolving door between Washington and corporate offices. In fact D.C. tops Silicon Valley with the highest per capita income.  Lobbying is a major industry in and of itself with twice the amount of money involved than 15 years ago.  So you are dreaming if you think any kind of real fix is coming from that arena.  As long as we sit helplessly on the sidelines, then the inevitable is that we will have more of the same where money does buy our government and laws.  Goodbye, democracy and hello plutocracy.

By doing something radical like finding one aspect of our lives everyday that we can truly be grateful for, then we begin to break the downward shrinking cycle of less and less for ourselves.  In practicing gratitude, ( Blog posted 1/24/13, Gratitude - the Sweetener of Life) we open ourselves up to expansion of abundance because we change our focus from I need to we have.  The Course in Miracles states, "Lack implies that you would be better off in a state somehow different from the one you are in."  By choosing gratitude, we break our "poor me - if only" thinking.

I am willing to bet that as each of us starts the practice of gratitude that the things in our lives that we select to be most grateful for are not going to be monetary in value - health, family, friends, pets, sunshine.... Make your own list.  Regardless of where you find yourself at this moment in life, there is one thing, no matter how small or insignificant, that you can be thankful for.  Start there and make the conscious decision to practice gratitude. Note how that makes you feel as opposed to sitting around moping and whining and suffering about all the things that you don't have or think that you need.  And all the ways that the system, your job or lack thereof, your boss, or your whatever is failing you. 

I will tell you a secret, life gives you what you need, not what you want.  So if there are lots of lemons at this moment, then you need the bitterness of those experiences to cleanse your perspective so that you can see all of what you already have and are not appreciating.  These difficulties have arisen because it is time for you to dig deep and empower yourself.  You are so much more powerful and creative then you have ever given yourself credit for.  Time to awaken to that fact. 


Gratitude will make you smile. It will put a spring in your step and cause you to hold your head a little higher when you walk.  It will open your eyes to opportunities that are all around you.  It will change your focus and your life.  In the process, you will begin to surrender your constant emphasis on not enough to one of realizing that in this moment, I have everything that I need to move forward.  In surrendering your need to whine and complain and blame others for making you a victim, you will find a new sense of self-respect and resilience.  You will begin to define for yourself your real needs and desires and in that process find your own solutions. You will begin to say YES to life.  In fact if you just can't be grateful, then at least say yes, yes, yes as many times a day as you want.  You will begin to feel lighter, guaranteed.  You may even begin to feel a strange tingling of happiness.  Practice gratitude long enough and you will begin to notice that you can reach out to others and give them a boost.  You are becoming a player in the game of life and having a stake in working towards a more sustainable future for all.  From giving to others, you will begin to notice that instead of just a tingle of happiness that you have a whole flood going.  Out of this abundance, sharing will flow and in the process create more and more, not just for yourself but for those around you as well.  The internet is already creating new communities of people who share resources.  For example just the peer-to-peer rental market is worth $26 billion a year. No big companies involved, just people sharing with each other goods and services instead of everyone having to have their own. It's called collaborative consumption. Already this new model is making regulators and companies nervous.  Truly the time is ripe for sharing and caring.  It is powerful.  Focus on abundance and it flows; focus on scarcity and it prevails.  Your choice.

I have no clue how this works; I just know that it does.  I think it has to do with grace.  (Blog posted 2/5/13, Secret Agent Grace)    When we make the conscious choice to get over our self inflicted victimhood, then we allow in the flow of grace. The key to opening that door is gratitude.  I urge each of us to take the 30 day gratitude challenge - each day for 30 days find one thing that you can be grateful for regardless of how small and say out loud, I am grateful for _______, thank you.  Even if you are skeptical at first, just do it.  And then for that day, every time, you find yourself beginning to feel sorry for yourself because of whatever or you begin to whine, stop yourself and practice your gratitude instead.  At the end of 30 days, take stock and see where you are. Just think if enough of us seriously do this for 30 days what we can collectively create - a true plutocracy, where we govern and live from the wealth of our hearts.  

Tired of suffering?  Give it up through the three Ss of surrender, serving and sharing. There is more than enough to go around. That is something for which to be truly grateful.




*"Economy" by Christopher Matthews, Time Magazine, June 17, 2013


http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/16/18989165-when-hate-mongers-give-you-lemons-set-up-a-lemonade-stand?lite=

Ding Dong! The King Is Dead!

"But we have to verify it legally to see...If "he" is morally, ethic'lly, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably dead." Wizard of Oz, Munchkins

(My apologies to lyricist, Harold Arlen, for altering the "she" to "he" but it is hard to improve on perfection when extrapolating the wicked witch's death in the Wizard of Oz and relating it to what is happening on today's world political, economic front.)

This song has been running in my head ever since the stalemate 2000 U.S. presidential election of Gore vs. Bush.  That is a long time to have an "earworm" but it was apparent to me as I sat glued to the TV watching all the players act their parts that what was really at stake was not who was to preside over the United States for the next four years but whether or not the prevailing paradigm of the old white king was to survive.  I watched the opening act of the staggering death scene as the old white courtiers, James Baker and Warren Christopher, presented the case for their respective candidate and realized that regardless of the issues, they both served the old white king model that the world has languished under for way too long.  While the rhetoric varied, the power structure was the same - the ruling elites would continue to gain and the rest of us would continue to serve.  This time however during the courtly proceedings, I noticed that the majesty of the court was tawdry and thread worn and we, the people, were weary of the same old, same old.  The fact that this scene was being played out in the first presidential election of the new century made it all the more significant to me.  A new day was dawning.

In the thirteen years since that election, I have seen only evidence that confirms my original assessment.  After King George ruled for 8 years, an African American king ascended the throne.  While still a male, the white part of the equation had finally shattered.  One more fatal blow to the old king.  Economic upheavals, wars and meltdowns have occurred as the king continues to stagger mortally wounded across the stage relying on old parlor tricks to keep us distracted as our country and the rest of the world falters under a system that no longer works.  For it is not just the gender or ethnicity of the king that is in rigor mortis but the entire system that he presides over: a system that uses might as right; a system that exists to serve the elites at the expense of the rest of humanity; a system that exploits the environment for temporary financial gain; a system that promotes "phantom wealth - money disconnected from the production or possession of anything of real power" over "real wealth from real resources to meet real needs."*  It is broken; it does not work; it is not sustainable. unstable economy

"Wake up - sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed,"*** Munchkin land, the wicked king is dead!  The illusion that has kept this system in play for so long has been exposed.  Scarcity is not the problem; greed is.  And our fear keeps us marching in place. Truly, there is enough to go around if we all decide to move beyond our fear, and decide to connect, cooperate, collaborate AND SHARE.  "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"**  So rejoice Munchkin land: "This is a day of independence for all the Munchkins and their descendants."***The wicked old king is dead and is soon to make an exit.  And you thought as you watched the 4th of July fireworks that Independence Day had happened in 1776.

As with all deaths, there is messy scary stuff that lies ahead and needs to be cleaned up before we can move forward unencumbered by the old model.  That brings up yet another "earworm" of mine.  "If there is somethin' strange in your neighborhood, Who you gonna call (ghostbusters.) If it's something weird and it don't look good, Who you gonna call (ghostbusters)"**** (Love this connection - the movie, Ghostbusters was released in 1984 and George Orwell's book of the same name is one of the hottest reads around now that Edward Snowden has confirmed that Big Brother really does listen in.)  So, who are we really gonna call to clean up this mess?  Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis in their hazmat suits with their flamethrowers to get rid of the ghosts that continue to haunt us?  Or is it time that we don our own hazmat suits and dig deeply into our own psyches to rid ourselves of the ghosts of systems of thinking past and our ungrounded fear in the boogie man?  By this time in reading these blogs, you know where to find your fears - they are where the lemons occur in your life.

The old king is mortally wounded like the Fisher King; he cannot and will not recover.  To continue with the old system of "Empire" thinking (bigger is better, Wall Street generated pseudo wealth) rather than a sustainable Earth Community (smaller, localized Main Street real-wealth economy)* will not revive the king.  He is dead.  We need to evolve past that paradigm.  It no longer works and to continue avoiding that fact will guarantee total collapse.  

The future lies in such radical thinking as producing only environmentally friendly products and services that serve actual real needs instead of wasting our precious resources on artificially contrived wants.  It is time to return to Adam Smith's vision "of local-market economies populated by small entrepreneurs, artisans, and family farmers with strong community roots, engaged in producing and exchanging goods and services to meet the needs of themselves and their neighbors."* Interestingly, the "father of modern economics" would not find pleasure in having his name attached to this modern form of capitalism.  He was opposed to "corporate monopolies and those who use their wealth and power in ways that harm others."* 

In 2004 as the old king lay mortally wounded, Mark Kurlansky's book, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, was published.  He provides detailed accounts of the various dissident movements around the world that happened that year from the Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention to the Paris riots, the Tet Offensive, the Prague spring and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.  In this global conflagration, the people of the world were fed up with the established order and disgusted with authoritarianism.  They were tired of the old white king and in riots all over the globe were serving him notice. It was the year that the world sounded his death knell. Kurlansky writes, this was the year that Walter Cronkite, the white TV grandfather, came to understand that "television was playing an important part not only in reporting of events, but in the shaping of them.  Increasingly, around the world, public demonstrations were being staged...for television."   Danny Cohn-Bendit of France said of these times: "We met through television, seeing pictures of each other on television.  We did not have a relationship with each other, but we had a relationship with what our imagination produced from seeing pictures of each other." 

In the years that have followed since the beginning of the tolling of the bell, the world stage has hosted a parade of conservative leaders who have tried without success to take us back to the nostalgic world of pre-1968 revolutions, where "Leave it to Beaver" skipped to school knowing that Ward was industriously at work and June was at home in her pearls simonizing everything in sight.  It has not worked, nor should it have.  We cannot go back; we must go forward.  What happened in 1968 as Kurlansky postulates is that a global village was born - one where everyone gets to be heard and seen.  Television was the medium to birth it but not sustain it because of the nature of its transitory flickering images and its limited ability to truly connect people.  As Cohn-Bendit said, "We did not have a relationship with each other."  Today, the technology that brings the world to each of our doorsteps does connect us instantly.  It is time to recapture the "sense of hope" that was Kurlansky's objective in writing of that pivotal year.  He postulates that the idealism that marked 1968 lives on today: "all over the world people know that they are not powerless..."

The question for each of us is "Has the answer blown away in the wind?" or are we at a point of history where we are ready to take the responsibility for ourselves and move beyond the old paradigm of the court of power, elites and toadyism that has kept us enslaved for so long.  For you see, we are our own jailers and the key that keeps us locked up is our fear.  

To those who were born in the optimism of post WWII and who came of age during the turbulent 60s, I say put on your hazmat suits for we are the toxic waste generation.  The task of cleaning up the spoils of the old court age falls to us.  Why else would Mother Nature have made sure there was such a glut of us born during those years but to ensure that there would be enough of us left at this stage to move forward?  We have the vision of  where we have been, who we are at this point and where we need to go.  

The answer, my friend has not blown away in the wind. Ironically, it was given to us at the end of that year of global unrest - the pictures of Earth from a lunar orbit that were taken in December 1968.  Astronaut Michael Collins put them in perspective for us: "an Earth as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied."

As catchy as the two "earworms" of the "Wicked Witch is Dead" and the "Ghostbusters" theme are, it is time that we all implant a new "earworm" - support local/ Main Street, not Wall Street - in our brains.  It may not be as sexy as the other two but it is essential if we are to survive.  In the event, you think I exaggerate, do an Internet search for "devaluation of the dollar" and watch some of the YouTubes that come up.  The party is over and as is the case with all good parties, it is now time to clean up.

Ding Dong! the King is Dead! That system is broken.  Local Lives!  Together, we can build strong inclusive communities for all.



 In case you need an example of the old white king mentality(more for me and less for you):
http://money.msn.com/now/post--charles-koch-dollar34000-puts-you-in-the-top-1percent


*Agenda for a New Economy, From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, David C. Korten
**Mark 8:36 King James Bible
*** Wizard of Oz
**** Ghostbuster

Goodness Gracious Sakes Alive

"If it isn't good, let it die.  If it doesn't die, make it good."
Ajahn Chah

"We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons."  
Alfred E. Neuman


The goodness factor: moral excellence; virtue; kindness; generosity; excellence of quality.  What is goodness?  While the attributes listed above touch on it, none of them nail it down.  Yet, we somehow intuitively know when something is good because it makes us feel happier and lighter inside.  It is sort of like the difference between having to take the bitterness of life's lemons straight and being able to add some sweetener.  The sweetener makes all the difference turning the unpleasant acrid taste of pure lemons into refreshing lemonade.  So how do we apply this sweetener to our culture to mitigate the acridness of our current situation?

In the simple wisdom of Ajahn Chah, we need to assess whether there is any inherent goodness.  If we think not, then we need to be prepared to rid ourselves of it and move on.  But if in that moving on, it doesn't die; then, we need to make it good.  And herein is the real nubbins of the issue.  To make something good that previously may not have been requires effort on our part.  It calls us to new thinking and new ways of doing things.  In the end, I think it all gets down to intention.  Is our intention to make it good for all of us or for just a select few?  That subtle shift makes all the difference and determines the goodness quotient of our results - the quality of the lemonade we make.

We have the potential to be so much more than what we have achieved so far.  The last few blogs have dealt with our dark sides and how that path is not sustainable for any of us.  Today, I wish to celebrate the resourceful cleverness that resides within each of us just waiting to get out.  As I write this blog, several hundred creative, resourceful entrepreneurs and business owners are converging on Buffalo, New York for the annual convention of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).  Their mission is a lofty one - "PROSPERITY FOR ALL."  I am not sure about you but I want to gather under that banner.  Even more idealistic is this statement: "Within a generation, we envision a global system of human-scale, interconnected local economies that function in harmony with local ecosystems to meet the basic needs of all people, support just and democratic societies, and foster joyful community life."  I say AMEN!  By shifting their focus from all-about-me-and-my-endeavor-in-isolation-and-competition-with- everyone-else to hey-let's-pool-our-resources-and-work-together-for-the-common-good, they are impacting communities and bringing about a social revolution from the ground up.  They are not waiting for the "big boys" to get involved; they have rolled up their sleeves and are figuring it out for themselves and luckily for the rest of us as well.  My money is on them.

In case you are still waiting for a great leader to emerge and lead us out of this quagmire, here is something to think about: social scientists have observed that once a complex system becomes corrupted, it cannot re-energize itself for self-correction.  The best bet is to find a safe creative space outside of the dominant system from which something new can be created from the ground up.  Sounds as if BALLE is just such a crucible for birthing an economy that brings true prosperity.  Has it ever made any sense that a "healthy" economy is one that is predicated upon people's ability to consume (greed) and is constantly growing with no discernable reason for that growth (cancer)?  To paraphrase what Michelle Long, Executive Director of BALLE, said at last year's convention, it's about living life as an experiment, making it up as we go along at the grass roots.  Adding my commentary, that really means that in order to do so, we have to be present in each moment and free to respond to what that moment has to offer.  Isn't that what the gurus have been preaching all along as the path to happiness and peace?   

Here are BALLE's guiding principles: 

• Think Local First - this improves the health of the environment, strengthens community, contributes to functional democracy
• Increase Self-Reliance - this increases local resilience, saves energy and creates a foundation for world peace.
• Share Prosperity - provides living wage jobs, creates opportunities for broad-based business ownership, engages in fair trade, and expects living returns from our capital
• Build Community - collaboration, cooperation, and fair trade between communities for a sustainable global society
• Work with Nature - every decision affects the vitality of our ecosystem
• Celebrate Diversity - increases resilience, propels innovation, cultivates peace and fosters beauty and joy
• Measure What Matters - success by what brings us knowledge, creativity, relationships, health, consciousness and happiness. 

After these principles, there really is not much else to add.  I recently made a trip to northwestern Pennsylvania where oil was discovered in the mid 1800s.  The prosperity of that time is reflected in the fading structures that remain.  I could not help but wonder what this landscape would be like today if those early tycoons had used the natural resources for the good of all and not just to build huge financial empires and line their own deep pockets.  It is a question that we no longer have the luxury of postponing the answer to.  We already know that our economy and way of life is not sustainable if left to its own over toxic inertia.  It is time to let it die and that part that doesn't, it is time to make it good.  

Hurrah for visionary thinkers and doers who are already hard at work birthing a new paradigm.  It is time for all of us to join the movement to support local sustainable communities.  And while we are at it, let's put real lemons back into the lemonade as well as in the furniture polish.   

Crossing the Rubicon

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

In January 49 BC, Julius Caesar made a decision to commit an act of treason by crossing the Rubicon River, which was the barrier between Gaul and Italy proper.  There was no turning back.  With this act of defiance, he set in motion the events that led to the rise of the Roman Empire and the nascence of modern European culture. History portrays him as the victor. 

I started this blog 2 weeks ago and have been trying to get a handle on it ever since.  It is not that I lack images - unfortunately there are many all too graphic images: flattened Oklahoma cities, flooded European countries, fires, a German Shepherd K-9 dog pawing the coffin of his dead partner in a final salute: death and destruction spread wide across the earth.  My desk is strewn with articles printed off of the internet declaring: "The idea of a totalitarian government monitoring your every move is probably still the stuff of fiction, but that doesn't mean your boss doesn't have a pretty good idea of your workday habits."  It continues with, "Experts say an abundance of fast-developing new technology is making it cheaper and easier for employers to read your e-mails, check out what you've been looking at on the Internet, track where you go with a company car or cell phone and find out when and where you were at work."*  Another article raises the question: "From invisibility to superhuman strength to telekinesis, a wave of emerging technologies promise to give people powers once reserved for comic-book characters.  Which raises an important question: If humans become superhuman, will we turn out to be superheroes - or supervillains?"**

Superheroes or supervillains - which will it be?  Seems to me that we have stuffed our noggins so full of information without knowledge; knowledge without wisdom that it is not more information that we need.  I do not need superhuman powers to see that we have definitely crossed the Rubicon and there is no turning back.  The best that we can do at this point is to slam on the brakes and look at the destruction to the environment, to our civilization, to ourselves that we are leaving in our rearview mirror. 

Today as I surfed the net, I came across the poignant story of a former drone sensor operator . While he sat miles away manipulating his computer, the drones he controlled wrecked unspeakable horror on other human beings.  He is haunted by the 1,600 deaths that he and his crew are responsible for.  The graphic computer images are seared into his brain.  In another story, an Army private is on trial because unable to take the horrors of what he was witnessing, he leaked military secrets in an effort to inform the American public of actions he considered to be inhumane and to spark debate. 

The Rubicon is behind us; we have crossed the boundary and are on the road to Rome.  Are we the victors or the traitors?  And if the traitors, what exactly have we betrayed?  I would offer the possibility that just perhaps what we have betrayed is our souls and our own humanity.

How did we arrive at this point?  We are better educated, fed - in fact in every measureable way, we are better off than ever before in history.  This is true even for the poor because they have  resources today that even the very wealthy in the past did not.  So, I ask again how did we get to this point?  We are the end result of the Age of Enlightenment,which was examined in more detail in The Opening post of this blog.  Extreme rationality has resulted in a world unmoored from any human moral judgement.  Where is compassion?  Where is the understanding that what we do to others, we do to ourselves?  Where is wisdom?  We have not evolved; we have devolved to our lowest common denominator and it is ugly.

                 We are the hollow men

                 We are the stuffed men

                 Leaning together

                 Headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!

                 Our dried voices, when

                 We whisper together

                 Are quiet and meaningless

                 As wind in dry grass

                 Or rats' feet over broken glass

                 In our dry cellar

                 Shape without form, shade without colour,

                 Paralysed force, gesture without motion;  ***

Eliot wrote these lines in the bloody aftermath of World War I,  The Great War - you know the one to end all wars.  He saw the tenuous thread of hope trying to rise above the destruction that had been Europe.  And surely, his poet's soul despaired at the folly that is man and the disastrous results of his unchecked rational brain.

                  This is the dead land

                  This is the cactus land

                  Here the stone images

                  Are raised, here they receive

                  The supplication of a dead man's hand

                  Under the twinkle of a fading star.***

I am thankful that I can only glimpse in those lines the nightmare computer images that are etched into the former drone operator's brain.  The horror of what washes over me makes me cry out: how many more do we have to kill; how much more money do we need to satisfy the greed that now replaces our souls?  We have crossed the Rubicon.

                  Between the idea

                  And the reality

                 Between the motion

                 And the act

                 Falls the Shadow

                                    For Thine is the Kingdom

                 Between the conception

                 And the creation

                 Between the emotion

                 And the response

                 Falls the Shadow

                                     Life is very long

                Between the desire

                And the spasm

                Between the potency

                And the existence

                Between the essence

                And the descent

                Falls the Shadow

                                   For Thine is the Kingdom

               For Thine is

               Life is

               For Thine is the***

Life is....what? Thine is the....what?  Depending upon how each of us answers these questions and how we choose to deal with the shadow that falls between the true reality of who we are as soul beings and the actuality of who we have allowed ourselves to become as hollow men will determine whether this crossing of the Rubicon is the end or the beginning.

                 This is the way the world ends
                 This is the way the world ends
                 This is the way the world ends
                 Not with a bang but a whimper.***

Only things of substance have a bang.




Are we on the verge of total self-destruction?                       


*Life Inc. on Today, May 15, 2013 by Allison Lin 
**The Quest to Build Better People. Superheroes or Supervillians? Slate, May 3, 2013 by Will Oremus  
***T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men  

"As You Like It"

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts...
                  William Shakespeare

Might as well tag on to a classic when it fits with the theme.  So with apologies to the Bard, I shall borrow his play title and Jaques's monologue to open this blog on duality.  We have been exploring how we see the lemons in our lives, whether they are to be disparaged or turned into something useful, lemonade.  It really comes down to what our perception is and the choices that we make.


In our ordinary plane of existence, duality reigns: good/bad; hero/enemy; happy/sad, right/wrong, etc.  This is not to say that these labels are true - they vary from person to person, culture to culture - but this is just the way that we choose to organize our lives.  This is the level of understanding with which we operate.  It simplifies our lives to have these prejudged categories in which to insert things.  We organize our world into the "I, me, my - 'the self'" of our lives and all the others that are not part of this "self."  Between the two, a great gulf of separation exists, never to be reconciled.  Our "I" on the one side and all the others on the other.  The bad guys are out there and the "I" of goodness is right here, part of the "self."  In both the two previous blogs, "The Opening" and "Heaven or Hell - the End or the Beginning," we dealt with this issue of duality.  It is a biggie and really spins our whole comprehension of life. As long as we feel/think that we are separate from the whole of the cosmos, then we will never have peace and completion.  There will always be that aching inside to find that which will complete us - status, the right mate, money, power, etc.  The cruel joke is that we are already complete and whole because not only are we connected to the source of all life, but it is the very essence of who we are. It is our erroneous thinking/perception that creates the illusion that passes as ordinary life.  To move into extraordinary, we have to break through that illusion and focus our attention on that which is true, that which emanates from within.  To better understand how this works, let's explore how we set up the stage of life from which we act out our own story lines and spin our drama, hoping that someone will notice and give us an Academy Award for our uniqueness. 

The plot begins with how we choose to understand and define reality.  If we see everything as either/or, then we start the duality game.  We are the recipients and not the actors; others have the power and we are just the pawns.  We nurture our wounds and gain solace in knowing that we are the victims who have no responsibility for what happens to us.  The best that we can do is to keep our heads down and hope for the best.  This thinking really borders on superstition.  If I carry a rabbit's foot in my pocket, wear a clove of garlic around my neck, then I will be safe from the vampires.  If we are able to muster enough energy resources and shift our focus, and this is key, then slowly our vision clears from the blur of illusion and we begin to realize that we are far more powerful than we could ever imagine.  As we look around our carefully laid out stage with all of the precisely placed props, we suddenly understand that we are the only actor on the stage and we have trained the spotlight on ourselves. 

With this shift in focus comes the realization that we play all the roles, the good, the bad and the ugly.  We are a one person production, pulling others in only when we need a supporting cast.  Depending on how large a production we are staging at the moment will determine how many "others" we need to include.  Sometimes, we collectively have a full scale extravaganza going and we need to have a cast of thousands such as when we wage world wars. On a personal level, there have been times in my life where I have had major productions going on several stages to quell the anxiety that I had kicked up.  Much easier to project that angst on others than to take responsibility for it myself. 

I have come to see the appearance of lemons as the heralds of yet another coming production.  Depending upon how consciously I deal with the lemons determines the extent of the upcoming production.  It has become apparent to me that regardless of how many other people I blame or draw into the production that I am the one playing all the roles, directing all the action to soothe whatever misperception I have entertained.  This point has been driven home when I find myself in a life or death struggle with some mechanical device, full scale drama taking place, with nary another person around. Talk about nonsense.

So if all of this is true, how do we go about utilizing the lemons and moving beyond duality to the harmony that is the underlying principle of the universe?  It really gets down to what we chose to see and on what "Cs" we choose to employ.  Competition keeps the duality going by fueling our need to prove ourselves better than and the misperception that we are not one and the same.  Cooperation, Collaboration, Connection, Compassion dissolve the illusion of duality by allowing us to exhale on having to defend ourselves from the "other."  To come to the understanding that we are the ones creating our story lines from the thoughts and images that we choose to project from within and that the external is just a reflection of what we are creating is quite a freeing experience. It affords us the opportunity to extend compassion - the ability to suffer together - to another.  Ultimately, the only true defense that any of us have is love - love and respect for ourselves and for each other.  I know that is a totally irrational concept especially if you have not explored that idea with us in "The Opening," but it is the only reality that there is.

Our focus determines our destination - the true reality of harmony or the illusion of jousting with windmills, thinking they are dragons, like Don Quixote.  In the end instead of taking the hero's journey towards the truth, we will have spent our time on a fool's errand.  It is really our choice.  Like Pacman and his goons, the lemons keep appearing alerting us to opportunities to move beyond duality.  Because we are formidable spirits, we will struggle until exhaustion overtakes and breaks us.  This is as it needs to be. 

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

That's how the light gets in.

  That's how the light gets in.*

I don't know about you but I am weary of this struggle with myself.  I am closing up my stage, turning off the spotlight, making my theater dark and I am planting a garden on that spot - a garden where life can be nurtured and watered with the "Cs" of cooperation, collaboration, connection, compassion.  I am going to harvest harmony.  It will be hard work to rid this space of all the noxious weeds that have been allowed to take root over the years but it will be soul satisfying, something that all of my theater productions over the years never were.  

I think that I will hang one of those pretty ceramic garden signs at the entrance: "Peace to all who enter here."

*Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"

Heaven or Hell - the End or the Beginning?

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."  Henry David Thoreau

I once saw a two frame cartoon with the exact same picture in each frame: it was a long room with a banquet table laden with food and people sitting along each side of the table.  In the one picture the people were all drawn looking, miserable and skeletal and in the other one they were robust and smiling.  The reason for the difference in the two groups was that in the robust happy group, they had chosen to use the long spoons strapped to their hands to feed each other while the morose group had chosen to try to feed only themselves with the spoons that were too long to reach their mouths.  Appropriately, the captions read heaven and hell.

We create our own story lines and depending upon where we choose to focus - on ourselves and our needs only or on the needs of the collective - we determine the quality of our lives.  To serve only ourselves will never be satisfying on a soul level.  Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not we are all connected and even the minutest thought has an effect on the whole.  So we are free to think that we are entitled to do and think as we please but there are ramifications.  Subtle at times but it is not as free a lunch as we would like to think.  Individually and collectively, we live under the systems that we have created for better or worse.  The density of our negativity has devolved a culture that only serves itself and not any of our human needs.  We are starving to death while we sit at the banquet table of abundance because we refuse to move beyond our self-serving desires.  Welcome to hell.

In his blog of Sunday, May 5, 2013 entitled, "Quit Your Slave Job! (And Live Your Dream Life), Eric Dubay writes, "If everyday you go to someone else's establishment, work on their schedule, do everything they say, and make money for them, then I am sorry to bear bad news, but you might be a slave."   He goes on to elaborate that it really does not matter how prestigious your position, the fact remains that someone else is controlling your time, your fortune and your destiny.  And to think that they have your best interests at heart is sheer folly.

Carolyn Myss in her book, Defy Gravity, describes the price we pay energetically for clinging to our fears and negativity.  "...your negative history creates psychic weight, and the more psychic 'weight' that you carry around with you, the longer you have to 'wait' for anything to heal, or to change..." She continues, "You will compromise the capacity of your soul to heal as a timeless vessel, because the psychic or time 'density' of your ego literally converts into lengthening physical time for any experience in life." Her punch line, "Holding on to past wounds and negative history is more than just an emotional or psychological problem; it drains us of the energy we need to rebuild the present in a healthy and functioning manner."

The lemons of change demanding that we move forward in our evolution are everywhere.  Even the heavens are bursting with this energy to assist in our passage from our status quo of self-imposed hell into the harmony of heaven.  Since the end of April, three  eclipses are happening, one in April and two in May. Susan Miller in her Astrology Zone for May, 2013 explains: "Eclipses are dramatic 'wild cards' in our horoscopes. They shake us up so that we can move from one level of evolution and maturity to another, higher phase, fairly rapidly."  Whether you believe in the veracity of astrology or not, three eclipses this close together is extremely rare.  The associations between the full moon and strange behavior are too numerous to totally discount.  Wikipedia defines, "Lunatic" is an informal term referring to people who are considered mentally ill, ... The word derives from lunaticus meaning "of the moon" or "moonstruck".  Just maybe we should pay attention to what the cosmos is trying to get through our thick skulls. 

So instead of using the following tin foil method of gaining enlightenment, wouldn't it just be easier to start changing our focus from the prevalent "I, Me, My, all about numero uno," to a more collective approach? Really, just what have we got to lose?  Granted it wouldn't be as attention grabbing as these tin foil lids but at least we wouldn't be miserable as we sit before the banquet table of life starving because we refuse to feed each other.  AND - there is more than enough if we all share and not hoard.   

Myss writes, "Compassion is a baffling response to those who live by the law of reason..."  Want to truly shake things up instead of defending your turf, what about applying a little compassion - giving others the same breaks you give yourself; to suffer together - and see what happens.  Bet you will feel better about yourself in the process and the lemon acid won't sting quite as badly.  "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself, " Leo Tolstoy.  Whether we live lives of quiet desperation or ones filled with abundance and joy is really up to us and the choices we make.  Do not blame others if you are not willing to move your thinking beyond the "I, Me, My" of the moment.  We all reap what we sow.  So if you are sitting at the banquet of life starving because someone else owns your time, your livelihood, your soul, what do you plan to do about it?

There are alternatives out there.  The questions we all need to ask, are we brave enough to confront our need for conformity, status, security, whatever it is that holds us back, to reach for our dreams?  As I have alluded to before in other blogs, there are companies out there structured to compensate individual effort and reward collective collaborative team building all the while allowing each person total autonomy.  If Eric Dubay's blog has awakened within you the desire to move beyond slavery and grubbing for your daily bread, then look beyond the status quo for extraordinary because it really does exist.  If we are content to continue to lead a quiet life of desperation, then no words or alternatives are going to change that.  But for those who do seek, there is always an answer.  If you are serious about creating a different more financially solvent future for yourself without owing your soul to the company store, let me know as there is always room for more at the banquet table of plenty.  There really is no better time than during these powerful eclipses to clean our houses with the cleansing properties of lemons so that we are purged and ready for the new.  Spring - it is such a harbinger of all that is possible.  The fall harvest depends upon what we sow today.  I am actively choosing to get over myself and to take a seat at the banquet table where we can all share and work together for the common good.  May I save you a seat?     

       

The Opening

"Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change - this is the rhythm of living, out of our overconfidence, fear, out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope.  And out of hope, progress."
                              Bruce Barton


Change, even the word itself has a jarring sound to it.  Change -short, abrupt, hard. 

We live in the delusion that things remain the same as they always have been and that somehow if we control well enough, if we are rational enough, we can maintain the status quo and avoid any unpleasant surprises.  We are creatures of habit and find security and comfort in the status quo; it quells our anxiety while it lulls us to sleep our lives away in an unconscious twilight, never reveling in the full sunshine of the extraordinary while we slip closer to the abyss of extinction.

In truth, the only reality is change, every second of every day brings this constant energy flow of change, whether we notice it or not.  And we flow with it, whether we wish to or not.  Today, our outer world is experiencing lightening fast change, creating constant upheaval in our lives with this or that new update, instantaneous breaking news and ever shifting events: job today, unemployment tomorrow; investments today, broke tomorrow; health today, serious illness tomorrow... It is impossible to keep up, to find any surety and it leads to stress and confusion and total breakdown of the system.  The institutions that were originally set up to serve us, we now serve.  Applying more rational systems to them is not the solution; it is the problem.

Our entire culture strains against the confines of its structure.  The unrest and instability are two surefire lemon signs that the times are a changing and beckoning us to move on with them.  We live at a nodal time of history.  To heed these signs of much needed change and to choose to move on will propel us forward both individually and collectively.  To resist and cling to the past models will lead to further crumbling.  We really are caught between a rock and a hard spot.  Either choice kicks up great anxiety.  It is a time that demands courage and clarity of vision and the discipline to step out of our comfort zones and embrace new ways of thinking and doing.  Qualities that only the irrational can supply.  And we need to do it now while grace has provided the opening.     

Only by turning in and finding that quiet source of balance can we even begin to hope to escape the madness of modern life.  For we are the "projector heads", who with our focus and rational thoughts have created our realities.  Tuning into our intuition is not an option, it is a necessity if we ever hope to escape the status quo treadmill of insanity that passes as modern life.  This is not just true on the personal level but on the global as well.  The world that we have collectively created is not sustainable and is poised to disappear with or without us depending on the choices that we make.  

Our world is the end product of the Age of Reason or Enlightenment and like the dinosaurs we are doomed to extinction unless we begin at once to exercise our innate intuitive Spiritual powers and quiet our over stimulated rational minds that feed our addiction for control.  Only by dancing with what we have long considered the irrational within us can we ever hope to gain enough wisdom to transcend the unreasonableness of our rational mind.  The answer to our complex issues does not lie in more research, more facts, figures, statistics.  "The answer my friend," as Peter, Paul and Mary sang, "is blowin' in the wind."  It is in the still quiet voice within each of us that we have long ignored and continue to ignore to our peril.    

In the foreword to Caroline Myss's book, Defy Gravity,Andrew Harvey writes: 
           "Our survival is threatened on every side - by
             the demons our passion for domination of each
             other and of  nature have unleashed, by our flawed
             and tribal understandings of religion that fuel instead
             of resolve conflict, and by our continuing refusal to
             face the personal and collective shadows of our greed,
             fear, cruelty and unacknowledged despair at our
             untransformed human nature." 

In his book, Voltaire's Bastards, The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, John Ralston Saul makes the statement: "Reason began, abruptly, to separate itself from and to outdistance the other more or less recognized human characteristics - spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but also intuition, will, and, most important, experience."  He continues, "It has reached a degree of imbalance so extreme that the mythological importance of reason obscures all else and has driven the other elements into the marginal frontiers of doubtful respectability."

Our rational minds have certainly given us a comfortable lifestyle -if you can afford it - but no quality or depth of life.  We have reached a precipice so scary that we now have drones and robots capable of destroying us with a mere flick of the switch while the fingers resting on that switch are unplugged from any ethical notion of what is truly the right thing to do.  Just who are the good guys in the white hats anymore? 

In his book which is almost 600 pages, Saul mentions women but three times, not because he demeans their value but because to the men who authored the Age of Reason, they had no value: 
           "The attitudes of our elites remain even less positive
             when dealing with women.  This had nothing to do
             with and has not been changed by a century of lobbying
             and struggling to integrate women into the mechanisms
             of power.  The simple truth is that they were not part
             of the formulation and creation of the Age of Reason.
             In fact, women were the symbol of the irrational. 
             Ever since the birth of the Age of Reason, women
             have been perceived by the new elites to be on the
             losing side."

On the losing side.....hmmmm.  I can't speak for any other woman except myself. Frankly, I am glad that I am seen of no value in this system that is failing all of us.  Losing side, indeed.  Pray tell, just what have any of us won in this uber world of the rational?  Certainly not our humanity or self-worth, or connection and caring for each other.

I am tired of reigning in my intuition that screams on a regular basis about living in the theater of the absurd. I am tired of a world where it is unsafe to watch a community marathon, where planes intentionally fly into buildings, where my hard earned tax money is used to kill other human beings in the name of national safety when there is not enough of that money left to feed children who go hungry.  I am tired of a culture where common sense is no longer of value.  I am tired of workplaces where people are not valued and are treated as commodities.  I am tired of churches that preach intolerance for other beliefs and create guilt and arrogance in their followers instead of love and respect.  I am tired of corporate greed and irresponsibility for the common good.  I am tired of  nature being exploited and destroyed in the name of progress.  I am tired of the dumbing down and the slick vaporous fad of the moment that creates false value.  I am tired of a disharmonious, disintegrous, meaningless world. 

So if this is what the winning side looks like, I'll be proud to sit on the losers' bench.  It is all nonsense and life is too precious a gift to waste one more minute on things that will never satisfy our souls.  I invite all - man, woman, child - who have had enough of the cheap thrills that our rational minds dish out to tune into that quiet place within that has been silenced for far too long and mine the rich vein of the irrational for the wisdom therein.  Only by going into the irrational will we find the answers and true empowerment that we need to deal with this rational world of ours.  That is where extraordinary really is.  And the opening to do so is now. 
  

 



 



  

Complexity,Thy Name is Woman

" The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless.  I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."  Alice Munroe


"I do not wish for women to have power over men; but over themselves."  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

"God gave women intuition and femininity.  Used properly, the combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met."  Farrah Fawcett

"Women have always been the strong ones of the world.  The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on.  They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants."  Coco Channel

"I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children and a career.  I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing."  Gloria Steinem

"After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'"  Anna Quindlen

With all due respect to Shakespeare's Hamlet, I feel that somehow in today's culture, complexity rather than fraility describes better the condition of woman.  I have been dancing around this topic ever since I saw Sheryl Sandberg resplendent in a red dress on the cover of the March 12, 2013 issue of Time Magazine with the caption, "Don't Hate Her Because She is Successful."  Maybe as an older woman, I should hate her because she looks so good in that dress??  Or maybe as an older woman who witnessed first hand the heyday of the feminist movement of the 60s/early 70s, I should have more sense than to wade into these roiled waters and mind my own business. The complexity of trying to define women is evidenced in the above quotes.  And the festering emotions are reflected in the opprobrium that highly visible successful women draw like Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, when she returned to work just two weeks after having a baby.  My squeamishness at even attempting to get a handle on this is apparent as I have gladly seized on any excuse not to write this blog.  It was started before the one on International Pi Day.  Even plumbing the depths of math and science was not as terrifying as trying to get a handle on this feminine stew that is brewing these days.   

So, what is going on?  We have the "mommy wars" - women squabbling about working vs. staying home with children - we have an article in the The Wall Street Journal, about "Queen Bees acting mean at the office" by Peggy Dexler - where 40% of the office bullies are women who direct most of their ill will towards other women 80% of the time.  So Girls, if I may use that term, what is the burr under our saddle?  We have come a very long way since women were jailed and force fed because they wanted to vote or a married woman wasn't permitted to own property or even since women didn't occupy corner offices or sit on boards of corporations.  Admittedly, those numbers are still quite small, only 4% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women and only 17% of board seats are held by women and these numbers are growing at a snail pace. But honestly, we do have more options than my mother's generation did back in the 40s/50s and my daughter has more than I did back in the 60s/70s.  Where is the missing piece of the puzzle?  Why all of the ill will?  Could it be that one size does not fit all and now that we have at least cracked open the door to the outside world that was denied to us for so long, we have found that it is not all that we thought it was going to be?  Perhaps it is time, we grow up, define for ourselves what would really work for us and find our own power as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley said instead of trying to stuff ourselves into the hand me down clothes of men.

There is so much buried detritus in our collective psyche, what Quindlen referred to as "not...enough," that to expect women to embrace these new opportunities without the weight of the past is an almost impossible dream.  What we see happening on the public stage is the burning off of the dross of centuries of the cultural overlay of what it meant to be a woman.  I have often wondered what a woman's true clear voice would sound like if she had been permitted to sing solo without the accompaniment of so strong a male dominated chorus.  Who are we really and what would a world that we set up to meet our deep needs look like?  I dare say that its landscape would be much different from what our world view is today.  This is not to deify women.  Because as we all have witnessed - hell, hath no fury like a woman scorned* or even one who thinks that just maybe she might be scorned.  We can be vicious.

I do not wish to give much space to a recitation of the past and its defining of the four virtues of womanhood - piety, purity, submission and domesticity - or of the sacredness of the home that women were to lovingly preserve or to the fact that it was considered unseemly for a woman to work for money especially if she were married.  What I do wish to emphasize is that since the burden of virtue was the woman's to bear, that left her male counterpart free to unleash all the unsavory beasts of the human spirit in the workplace.  To protect his open hearth furnaces at the Homestead Works, industrialist Henry Clay Frick felt no restraint in calling in the Pinkerton guards to break up the 1892 steel strike  because his hearth at home was guarded by his wife and children whom he called his angels at home.  How much of what passes today for  business as usual is predicated on this Victorian schism between the public face of society that men dominated and the sanctity of the home that was women's domain?  I think we continue to live in the fallout from the fact that women were excluded from the public dialogue for so long and muted as agents for social change.  All social change came from the men who were already in charge of the culture.  Now, isn't that a cosy little picture?  Because history is retold ad nauseum from the male perspective and women are virtually invisible in that story, each generation of women has been left to start from scratch in attempting to get a grip on the outside world without benefit of role models from the past.  

While this is not as true today as it has been in the past, I do feel this is a salient point especially as women make their way in the business world.  All we have as models for the most part are what men have done and been.  And quite frankly, that model is more reflective of bottom line than human values.  According to the Economic Policy Institute between 1978 - 2011 CEO pay increased 725% while workers only went up by 5.7% and the minimum wage actually declined by over 20%.  William Falk in the March 15, 2013 issue of The Week, reports that "Corporate profits are soaring, and companies have piled up a record $1.4 trillion in available cash."  He goes on to write that workers' "raises have become.... unnecessary.  Since 2008, corporate earnings have risen 20% a year while worker salaries have been flat."  Downsizing is still the corporate motto, expecting those who still have jobs to be grateful and to be productive, meaning working 11 hour days and weekends, and by the way - a good team member skips vacations as well.  According to the American Psychological Association, "more than half the U.S workforce feels underpaid and unappreciated, and a third suffers symptoms of chronic, work-induced stress" with women reporting higher levels of work stress than their male counterparts.  Feeling a little cranky??  Perhaps, it really isn't the woman in the next cubicle who is the culprit.  It just could be the whole sordid conditions of business as usual.

And another thing, I am no longer buying the old adage that in order to make a profit that this is the way business needs to operate.  There have been way too many studies that prove otherwise.  Plus from first hand experience, the business opportunity that I am involved with is blowing the competition away with a collaborative, cooperative model that puts people at the head of the business equation.  It is time to move beyond 19th century values. There really are win, win solutions out there if we choose to look beyond the status quo.  Isn't that what extraordinary is all about? 

Sandberg wants women to "lean in."  So do I.  I think it is now time since women comprise almost half of the workforce, 49% to 51% and in the 25 to 34 age group, more women than men have college degrees that we lean into our hearts and figure out just what kind of workplace we want to work in.  When we were new to the game, we had to fit in but we are way past that stage at this point.  And anyways, where we are at this point is not sustainable so what have we got to loose?  Not only are these conditions not good for us, they are not good for any living being.  No wonder there is such ambivalence on the parts of women as to how much of their lives they really want to commit to such a poor quality of life.  Surely to goodness there has to be more to life than these statistics suggest.  And that doesn't even begin to address the larger question if this is even the best environment for women to use their intelligence and talents.  This is a question Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, who runs 20-first, a global management consultancy, raised in the Time article on Sandberg: "Are we going to spend another 20 years trying to make women adapt to a system that doesn't fit them?"  She takes exception to Sandberg's theory that women have to step up and be more assertive, "It is insulting to women to say they need to become more like men to succeed." 

Because, we have had to survive on the fringes of the culture and because we are wired differently, women have always pioneered new ways of doing things.  The Winter, 2013 issue of Pitt Magazine, cites new University of Pittsburgh Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor, Patricia Beeson's "keen ability to transform challenges into opportunities" while crediting her leadership style - "listening, gathering opinions, questioning, and then taking decisive action" - to making "the best decisions for the institution."   In the same issue, Edna Beatrice Chappell McKenzie, pioneering journalist, activist and educator is quoted as saying that "African American women were the 'keepers of the culture' and she was one of them."  In its "10 Questions" section of the March 25, 2013 issue, Time Magazine interviewed Nobel Peace Prize winner and activist, Jody Williams on how she thought that female activists differed from male activists.  She said, "Shirin Ebadi, who received the Peace Prize in 2003, said there are seven women alive who have received the Peace Prize; shouldn't we try to think about a project we can do together?  And the Nobel Women's Initiative was born."  Williams continues, "Male Peace Prize winners have never come together to use their access and influence to support building sustainable peace.  Get a critical mass of women and it was the first thing we thought of." 

The world needs to hear mature women voices, not just in business - although data from McKinsey shows that companies with more women on their boards are more profitable - but in every aspect of contemporary life.  Women need to lean in to our true voices and become culture changers.  We are reaching critical mass and we need to speak up not just for our good but for the larger good as well.

The times they are a changing.  Former Venezuelan cabinet member, now part of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Moises Naim, writes in "The End of Power" that hierarchies of power are breaking down.  He believes that companies are more fragile, people with power are more vulnerable citing the fluctuation in the top 1% as the reigns are constantly changing.  He credits the anti-power revolution evidenced in Occupy Wall Street and Tea Partiers for helping to change the power landscape.  People in power are more visible than ever before; they are only a Google search away from exposure.  Ordinary people have access to the same data bank of knowledge and that is the new currency to opportunity. 

So what do you think, women?  Has the time come for us to put aside our cattiness (come on you all know what I am talking about) and our self-serving antics for petty power and start pulling together and empowering ourselves and each other?  Instead of taking the lemons that occur during the day and squirting the acid all over each other, use it instead to make the Immune Support Tea recipe at the bottom of the blog.  (I know you were wondering how I was going to work in the lemon thing.)  If anyone is going to change the corporate culture and in turn the larger culture into a place that at least meets some of our human needs, it is going to have to be the women because the men are being even more damaged by it than we.  By working together, we can create an environment that fulfills Sofia Vergara quote, "I guess at the end of the day, all women like to be treated with respect and kindness."  Isn't that the way that we all, male and female, like to be treated?  Phew, I do feel better having said all that but I do have to admit, I am still having a hard time with how good Sandberg looks in that dress.  Meow.


Immune Support Tea

This diaphoretic tea is recommended by MediHerb speaker Berris Burgoyne, BHSc, ND, Dip Herb.  She is a renowned herbal clinician with more than 20 years of experience and runs a highly successful clinic in Brisbane, Australia.  Give yourself a break and a boost with this tea.  One of the side benefits is it will raise your body temperature slightly and may cause you to sweat out some toxins.

Juice one lemon
1-2 cloves garlic crushed
1 teaspoon finely chopped or grated ginger or 1/4 teaspoon dried ginger
pinch of chili powder
1-2 teaspoons of honey

Place all ingredients in a mug.  Add boiling water.  Cover and let steep for 10 minutes.

Enjoy 


* William Congreve, The Mourning Bride


When all else fails, nothing beats a good laugh. So go ahead and laugh at the folly of men and women and how our brains work. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKveOsIieHg