Realizing Ordinary

I'm moving! New name, new URL

2009-09-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

To here, to there
Image: © L. Kathryn Grace

Six years ago, when I first published this blog, I had two objectives: To encourage discussion about the Village of Ordinary, and to collect stories about real people and real technology that show just how possible Ordinary is today.

What I've discovered is absolutely amazing: Thousands and thousands, perhaps millions of people, all over the world are working to grow a social structure more like Ordinary than not. I've posted a few of their stories along the way, but there are many, many more.

To reflect that Ordinary is no longer merely a vision--a dream to which we can only hope and aspire--but a real-world possibility right now, I am pursuing the work under a more appropriate name: Building Ordinary. You may not see a big difference right away. Cosmetically, only the name and URL have changed, but you may notice that the new blog is more personal in nature, occasionally more political, and more strongly encourages your participation. That's because we need each other. Building a sustainable, peaceful community requires connection, a deepening understanding of one another.

Join me there, won't you? Together, we are building a better world, one blog post, one energy-efficient light bulb, one straw bale house, one organic garden, one micro-loan, one eco-village, one re-charged aquifer, one political action, one kindness, one life saved, and surely one day at a time.

Ordinary Hero: Padmashree Dr. Anil Joshi

2009-07-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

One of the most exciting environmental stories in a long time is this one. A dedicated researcher/activist in rural India, Padmashree Dr. Anil Joshi, using modern and ancient technologies, proved that it is possible to recharge small aquifers and spring catchments. Why is this exciting, you ask? Because water is life. Without it we die. In recharging dormant springs, Dr. Joshi brought life and hope for a better future to one of the poorest regions of India, and just possibly to all of us, as water shortages loom worldwide. Here's the story.

Thousands of years ago, the people who live in India's Himalayas built their villages near natural springs sheltered by dense forests. For eons, annual rains recharged the forest-shrouded springs and the aquifers that fed them. The tree canopy, and the organic offal it sacrificed to the forest floor, preserved moisture and assured the springs continued to bubble year round. The springs nourished the rural agricultural economy of the region, and the villagers were well-fed and content.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. After almost two hundred years of British colonial rule (pp.3, pdf file), India leapt into the industrialized world as a sovereign state and began its steady march toward becoming the fourth largest economy in the world (4th largest in 2009 GDP PPI). India's rapid growth, industrialization and centralization took their toll on the forests and watersheds of the Himalayas. Deforestation laid so much land bare that the spring catchments no longer held enough water to serve the villages year round. Many dried up altogether.

Without water, the people could not survive. Many abandoned their waterless villages. Others struggled with increasing poverty and hunger as their crops no longer supported them. Families were broken: The men moved to urban centers, often thousands of kilometers away, looking for jobs, leaving the women and children behind to work the land alone, dependent on their husbands and fathers to send money to get them through the drought seasons.

Enter Dr. Joshi and his organization Himalayan Environmental studies & Conservation Organization (HESCO). Himself once a child of the hills. Dr. Joshi believed that science and technology, together with ancient, tested wisdom, were the keys to improving quality of life and to developing the region economically.

Dr. Joshi recruited a team of scientists to locate a number of spring catchments. When they knew where the springs collected water, they built small dams and embankments called green bunds, which is ancient Hindu technology, to capture moisture and recharge the springs during the rainy season. Villagers built and filled storage tanks to provide a year-round water supply. Now the villages grow and harvest crops for food and for markets outside their area. Farms are prospering once again. Young farmers are staying in the region to till the land and turn a profit.

More, the villages are tweaking another ancient technology, water mills, many of which have been operating for centuries, to provide power from their springs and streams. Generating their own electricity takes them off the less reliable, centralized national grid. With plenty of dependable, locally-generated power streaming to their homes and businesses, in some cases for the first time, the people of the Himalayas can start new businesses and cottage industries with confidence, knowing they will not have to work in the dark, or wait for sporadic energy to power their equipment.

That's not all. Most of India's energy is derived through coal-fired plants. By generating their own power using their recharged streams and springs, rural communities are lowering their carbon output.

Not only is this story exciting for the people whose lives it has changed so dramatically in India, it is exciting for the world as we all face more and more severe water shortages in the decades to come. Dr. Joshi's work shows us that a decentralized water supply, using a mixture of new and time-tested technology, can save and sustain lives, spur local economies, and save the planet.

What's more, this is only one of literally dozens of innovative, life-changing, life-enhancing projects Dr. Joshi has initiated to help rural India raise itself from poverty to an ever-improving quality of life. Learn more about the man and his life work at HESCO, whose creed could be a model for any of us.

HESCO Philosophy
Serve in the spirit of dedicated volunteerism
Acknowledge and develop the natural talents of the people you serve
Give freely of your knowledge and time
Encourage self-sufficient and "simple" solutions to the practical problems of those you serve
Promote the practice of "shridan": that every village which is helped with development, will in turn, adopt and help another village in their locality
Promote sustainable development with a priority on environmental protection and economic independence
HESCO

For choosing to return to his homelands and utilize his training and knowledge to help his people lift themselves from poverty to prosperity, for honoring the wisdom of millenia and melding it with the science and technology of today, for committing to utilizing local materials and resources to solve local problems, for decentralizing energy and water sources while improving their reliability and availability, and for living among and listening to the people he serves, the Ordinary Heroes Award is offered to Padmashree Dr. Anil Joshi with respect and gratitude.

With gratitude to Tweet timlawler who introduced me to Dr. Joshi in his 6/28 tweet: "The Mountain Man The Better India: A bright student, he did well through school and college and after completi.. http://bit.ly/196JgG".

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace, all rights reserved.

Making ripples: Three bloggers whose word pebbles tickle my toes

2009-07-05T16:37:00.000-07:00

Image by Sean Rogers1 via Flickr

I just discovered another must-read, must-follow blogger, Tamara Cameron of A passion shared. A "seeker of health, happiness and all things green and local," Tamara's latest posts include Food, Health, Life & Michael Pollan and Local Beef -IT's What's For Dinner!

Another greenie, and one I read every chance I get, is Wendy Gabriel of My Green Side. She's on top of green parenting, does a regular and fun Photo Friday post and frequently interviews an eco mover and shaker with four questions. Her latest is green foodie, mom and writer Robin Shreeves.

For thought-provoking discussion, a sparkling photo journal (one a day, almost, like the strawberry shown here) and respite from the storms, I visit Wanda at What would Wanda do?. It's my cup of tea moment on the weekends, and almost always the last thing I do Sunday night before sleep. Wanda's posts calm the mind and spur the spirit to right choices, right living.

Wanda, Wendy and Tamara touch me with their energy, passion, love and spirit. I give gratitude for their commitment to share their wisdom and lives with their readers. They are among the many people in this world whose work brings us all a little closer every day to the vision of the Village of Ordinary. Who are you reading today, and what do you learn from them?

Ripple image courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/rogerss1/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Strawberry image courtesy Wanda of What Would Wanda Do?
All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.

Happy Fourth of July all!

2009-07-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

May all people everywhere soon celebrate independence and freedom, and may we all make peace. Thomas Berry gives us much reason to hope.

I would suggest that we see these early years of the 21st century as the period when we discover the great community of the Earth, a comprehensive community of all the living and non-living components of the planet. We are just discovering that the human project is itself a component of the Earth project, that our intimacy with the Earth is our way to intimacy with each other. Such are the foundations of our journey into the future.
Yes! Magazine: "A New Culture Emerges"

Happy Fourth of July, Everyone!

Ordinary Hero: Denise Cerreta

2009-07-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

Denise Cerreta wants to eliminate world hunger. She started in her own neighborhood, Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2003, when she opened One World Cafe, serving delicious, in-season organic food. Her vision was to provide a living wage to each of her employees, turn no one away for lack of money, and care for the planet by minimizing waste.

One more thing. Patrons would pay what they felt their meal was worth--in cash or in a work exchange.

We are dedicated to eliminating world hunger.
We are dedicated to serving organic unprocessed food.
We are dedicated to feeding and including all members of our community.
We are dedicated to eliminating waste in the food industry.
We believe that we can trust our customers to be inspired, honest and fair in their exchange of money and/or work for the fresh, gourmet, organic food we prepare both mindfully and in a heartfelt way each day.
We will keep believing.
One World Everybody Eats vision statement

One of Cerreta's chief concerns in opening One World Cafe was the tremendous food waste from commercial kitchens. American restaurants are particularly notorious for serving enormous portions. How many times does your order arrive at the table piled high enough to serve a family of four? Do you ask for a box and bag to take the leftovers home? How often do you (or your dog) actually eat them? Or do they languish in the refrigerator, pushed ever further back, until one day you open them to find something that looks like a science experiment gone awry?

Patrons would pay what they felt their meal was worth--in cash or in a work exchange.

When Cerreta's guests choose their prices and their portions, she says they tend to take only what they will eat, eliminating much of the food waste we see so often in traditional establishments.

Serving those less fortunate, and helping them retain their dignity, is another of Cerreta's objectives. One hour's work in the restaurant earns a voucher for one meal. Out of work parent? If your children are under eight, they eat free on the same one-meal voucher. If you have neither money nor time, there is always at least one staple dish, such as rice and lentils or rice and dahl, available to the hungry with no strings attached.

In 2006, spurred by requests from all over the country for help establishing similar ventures, Cerreta filed for non-profit 501(3)c status and founded the One World Everybody Eats Foundation. Since then, she has referred to the cafe as a community kitchen. The foundation explains the change this way.

Since our beginning, we have recognized the spontaneous community building that happens as a result of our venue, which we now call a "community kitchen" rather than a "cafe". We also believe that nothing will further our vision better than having the strength of community behind us.
Denise Cerreta in "Message from Founder Denise Cerreta"

Eventually, Cerreta established gardens to support another of their founding principles: To serve wholesome, nutritious, organically grown foods. Much of the organic produce used in the kitchen comes from the garden in this image. Some also comes from kindly gardeners who produce far more than they can eat, preserve and give away.

These values and principles are among those that make Denise Cerreta a fine candidate for the Ordinary Heroes Award.

The reason our heroes are so important to us is because they do extraordinary things. They take risks, venturing into untraveled territory, often with inadequate preparation. High risk almost guarantees some failure. Mistakes will be made.

It's not easy launching a restaurant which expects its patrons to set the price they're willing to pay for their food. Keeping the cafe going for six years borders on the miraculous. There have been less-than miraculous bumps along the way. Cerreta herself has said more than once that she was ill-prepared for the venture.

In October 2008, she and the foundation's board reportedly fired its "long-time" manager, which in turn spurred the entire staff to walk out, alleging bounced paychecks and disrespectful treatment.

The One World Everybody Eats web site does not address the staff allegations directly, though you will find mention of it in some of the articles posted on their newsroom page. While I hope Cerreta will confront the allegations head on at some point, her initial vision to serve the hungry as well as the affluent, and expect each to pay as they are able for the bounty they receive, along with the courage and stamina she has shown in keeping faith with her vision, are heroic acts at a time in which we hear so much of rampant greed and outright swindling (Bernie Madoff, anyone?).

Despite the near loss of the One World venue, as Cerreta calls it, she and One World Everybody Eats are back on track in 2009 and continue to inspire others. There are now five similar kitchens in the United States, in Denver, CO, Spokane, WA, Charleston, SC, Durham, NC, and a brand new one in Arlington, TX.

Cerreta plans to focus more and more on helping others found community kitchens with no menu and no prices. "Our goal is to continue to move the One World Everybody Eats vision to larger audiences," she says in a personal message. She continues:

We see that mentoring and networking fledgling efforts around the country is where our energy can be best spent. And we are working to connect those people and efforts. Because by letting everyone who is striving to establish their own effort in their own community see they are not alone, we think it may help the establishment of successful endeavors nationwide even faster. And we relish the role and opportunity to help the no-menu, no-prices community building model to fruition everywhere.

To that end, Cerreta travels wherever she is needed to assist in establishing a new community kitchen. She has volunteered as much as a month of her time, working the counter in new kitchens. She and the foundation provide a free online how-to, "Spirit in Business: A Guide for Starting a Community Kitchen," (pdf format) which they are planning to expand to a full book.

For visioning a world free of hunger, for trusting her patrons to pay a fair price for the food she serves, for assuring no one who enters her doors leaves hungry whatever their circumstances, for setting the standard of serving wholesome, organically grown, nutritious foods, for encouraging other food purveyors to consider the no menu-no price model, for working diligently to eliminate food waste and for making a commitment to pay employees a living wage, this week's Ordinary Hero Award is humbly and gratefully offered to Denise Cerreta.

Images of the One World community kitchen and garden courtesy One World Everybody Eats newsroom.

How to build Ordinary when Iran is beating and shooting its citizens and North Korea threatens to annihilate us all

2009-06-29T01:15:00.000-07:00

Image by .faramarz via Flickr

While every aspect of Ordinary exists or has existed somewhere on the planet, the world of Ordinary does not yet exist, as is so evident with recent events in Iran and North Korea.

People in Iran risk their lives every day to send us images of the violence they endure. The images shock the soul and tear the heart. Documented and undocumented stories abound of police, military and militia kidnappings, beatings, arrests, imprisonments, torture; of hospitals forced to turn over bodies and the wounded to be carted off by government officials to unknown destinations; of families of the dead removed from their homes and relocated to undisclosed locations; of hired thugs from foreign lands wielding clubs and axes indiscriminately on men, women, pregnant women, children.*

Image by .faramarz via Flickr

In its efforts to silence its people, the Iranian government has imprisoned journalists, foreign embassy officials and staff, politicians, professors, students, and ordinary citizens. Nightly, the government sends its militia to raid homes, tearing out and destroying their satellite dishes so the people cannot receive news from the outside world.*

Watching the government beat, torture and shoot its citizens in cold blood, I learn that this recent violence is only that. Recent. Documented stories tell of decades of imprisoned, tortured and disappeared journalists and citizens, one individual after another.

Image by .faramarz via Flickr

Among the videos tonight is one, in six segments, not of this uprising but of the public execution at six o'clock in the morning a few years ago of a sixteen year old girl, Atefah Sahaaleh, for crimes against chastity. Coerced and raped by a 51 year old man, Atefah had been sentenced to die for adultery. As they do in Iran these days, and as the story revealed with graphic examples, they hanged this young woman from an industrial crane. Her rapist received one hundred lashes. She had received many more before her death.

There are more such stories. The number seems endless. I am in a stupor of grief and shock.

All this from a country who desperately wants the nuclear bomb. Which brings me to North Korea. They already have the nuclear bomb and have trained several missiles on the United States. Of course, the bombs are not aimed only at the United States. South Korea is most at risk right now, and even China and Russia are concerned enough that they joined the United Nations in sanctions against North Korea, a rare stand for these traditional allies.

As if irreversible climate change were not already occurring, as if the world economy were not struggling to reverse a nose dive, as if water scarcity and ozone depletion did not threaten all of human kind, we ordinary citizens once again face the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation and the sure, very graphic, up close and personal images of human beings beating and slaughtering other human beings in a political power struggle.

If we choose to make ourselves aware, it is not difficult to find similar stories in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Nepal, and a host of other countries. (In fact, the United States State Department today lists travel warnings for no less than twenty-nine hot spots around the world where upheaval and violence make visitation dangerous. Where there is violence, human rights abuses are almost always found.)

Image via Wikipedia

All big picture stuff, right? So how do we build Ordinary when we are faced with so much violence and threat? What can you or I possibly do to mitigate any of these situations?

Turns out there is a lot we can do in regard to human rights. We must honor the people in Iraq and elsewhere around the world who have risked their lives to show us the horrors they face and endure. We must take action, however and wherever we can. Below is a short list of organizations that work to protect and promote human rights. Several have a page of direct action you can take right now. Go to them. Find at least one action you can take today. Make a date with yourself for the next action you will take and keep it. When you do, make another date and another. Knowledge is responsibility. We no longer have the luxury of pretending we are so far isolated from these world events that we have no power to act. Please act now.

For a more comprehensive list, visit the Human Rights Web Resource Page.

That brings us to the second big issue. How to respond to the nuclear threats posed by North Korea, as well as the numerous other countries, including our own, who possess the power to destroy the world many times over? The following are a very few of the organizations that work to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons around the world. They too have action pages.

For a comprehensive list, including links to webs sites on international law, visit Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's web links page.

To the direct actions available to you on the above web pages, I add stand for peace. Standing for peace every day, even for five minutes a day, makes a difference in my personal life. It also gives me the courage to watch a few of the videos from Iran each night and broaden my personal commitment to taking action to promote peace.

Can any of this work possibly be enough? Who can say? I know I cannot continue as though I don't know the people of Iran are asking for my help and my voice. So I write this. I pray. I stand for peace. This is how I am building the world of Ordinary right now.

Please, can we talk? Just as we pile one brick on another to build a community center, so we can build a peaceful world, one non-violent action at a time. In the comments below, tell us what you are doing What single step will you take this week? What date will you make with yourself for additional action? What other ideas about making peace here and abroad can you contribute?

*With the exception of the two relatively tame images above, I have not linked to the articles, images and videos that document these events, but if you feel compelled to see and judge for yourself, you won't have far to search on YouTube or most any search engine to which you subscribe.

The Iran images in this post are used with permission under

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fhashemi/ / CC BY 2.0.

The I wage peace image is courtesy Bruce Barrett.

Ordinary Hero: Iranian Woman

2009-06-25T05:15:00.000-07:00

Image by misterarasmus via Flickr

After its recent election, and in the face of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of protesters demanding an investigation into what they suspected was a fraudulent result, the Iranian government silenced foreign reporters. The government also attempted to silence individual Iranians by restricting their access to the Internet.

Many brave Iranians have found ways to get news of their protest rallies, and the violent government response, out of the country. Yesterday may have been the bloodiest day yet. Some have dubbed it Iran's Tienanmen Square. Others call it a massacre. Many Iranians posted horrific images on Twitter, YouTube and FaceBook. Reportedly, whenever they post, they risk discovery, arrest, beatings and perhaps death.

One woman somehow managed to call CNN directly and spoke live to reporter Ivan Watson. We do not learn her name, presumably because of the danger to her and her family, and it is difficult to verify her story. In the video, though, Watson indicates to her that they have received similar reports from other sources inside the country, and I have watched a slew of video clips tonight that support her allegations as well.

Here is her story, in her own words, as reported by CNN. Warning: It is a deeply disturbing account.

Update 6/25/09: Apparently the video above has been removed or disabled, at least temporarily. Another user has posted the same video here. Please let me know in the comments below if this one disappears as well. Meanwhile, I will try to learn why the video is no longer working on the original site and will update when and if I learn anything.

Anonymous, traumatized, terrified, the caller nevertheless risked her life to share what she had witnessed and to plea for help.

For refusing to be silent in the face of injustice, for standing with courage and doing what she can to help those suffering around her, for working with the resources at her disposal to bring the world a little further from the chaos of reprisal and bloodshed and a little closer to cooperation and peace, the Ordinary Heroes Award is gently offered to this unnamed Iranian woman with hope and prayers that she and the people of her country soon may live in peace and harmony.

It is also given with a desire to answer her call for help.

Because this woman, and so many other Iranians, are successful in broadcasting their stories to the world, we who read, listen and watch in horror are forced to accept once again that unmitigated cruelty exists in the world. To stand by and do nothing would be to collude with the perpetrators.

I take only one side, that of compassionate peace, and that leaves me with no clear, direct path to be of use to the caller and to the people suffering. I am mindful, though, of the powerful message of Sharon Mehdi's book, The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering. I have witnessed the miraculous results that can be found in focus and prayer, particularly when more than one person is engaged, and so I call on the grandmothers, and any who would stand with us, to stand for peace.

Stand in your churches, your homes your places of work, on your street corners and buses and playgrounds. Stand for peace. Stand with the intent that this woman's anguish be healed, her country be healed, and that the leaders of the country be healed. Now is the time.

Cranky grandmother stands for peace

2009-06-22T05:45:00.000-07:00

Image by tomeppy via Flickr

The first couple of weeks I stood for peace, I noticed that I seemed to be, well, rather cranky. I found myself showing irritation to people on the bus and sidewalk to whom I would ordinarily give way. In fact, I cursed out loud the automatic checkout machine at a supermarket I patronize infrequently.

Its disembodied voice insisted I had more items in the checkout bay and wouldn't let me pay. Worse, once it took my money, it immediately chided me to pick up my packages and exit while I waited for my change and receipt. I fumed in, ahem, colorful language. When the attendant standing nearby laughed, instead of chuckling with her at my frustration and inanity, I frowned and told her how much I dislike shopping in her store, perhaps a little more loudly than I wish to recall. The poor woman! It's not her fault her company chooses to remove the small bit of human exchange we enjoy while shopping.

As a young woman, I dreaded my weekly grocery shopping trips, trying to fit our growing family's needs into a budget that was not growing with us, but the friendly banter with the checkout clerks at the supermarket, meat, milk and health food stores (yes, shopping was an all-day chore) made up for the stress and sometimes mitigated the headache I almost always developed by the end of the day, when I knew I would be faced with my husband's scowls and complaints over the money I had spent. (Did I buy the ice cream, candy and cookies he bought when he shopped? No! Frugal housewife that I was, I avoided all empty-calorie foods.) Eventually, I wised up and delegated the shopping to him. No more shoehorning the budget. No more headaches. No more grumpy husband. Lots of sweets and salty foods in the house. Now that's one way to make peace at home, folks, though it wreaks havoc on the diet.

So when I found myself behaving increasingly surly those first few weeks, I was puzzled. Here I was, enjoying this delightful interlude of quiet, humbling peace each evening, yet uttering mild profanities under my breath when unconscious or just plain rude urbanites bumped into me on the street or spit in my face while coughing on the bus.

Now I ask you, how was I making peace?

One sunny morning, my sweetie and I ambled down the street with our granddaughter in the stroller. Repeatedly, groups of individuals approached from the opposite direction, spaced four abreast across the entire width of the sidewalk with no sign of shifting to make room for oncoming traffic (us). Customarily, we moved as close to the right as we could, but inevitably, the nearest oncomers bumped or brushed us as they passed, apparently oblivious to our presence. This time, instead of pulling behind my partner and the stroller, obstinately, I held my ground. The young man immediately in my path ran smack dab into me, full on, as though I were invisible. (Believe me, it took effort not to dodge at the last second.) To his credit, while his friends snickered and chortled, he turned back after our collision with the briefest "Sorry!" I, on the other hand, scowled in return. Now I ask you, how was I making peace?

I belie my intent to make peace when I behave with intolerance or worse, without compassion.

My face and my name are on public web pages for the world to see. When I'm out and about, since my readership is quite small, it's unlikely someone will recognize the crabby old woman muttering under her breath about rude bus drivers or flashing a "What's with you?" hand and stare at the impatient driver honking while she hobbles across the street. Still, making my stand for peace public also makes me responsible, not just for being the peace I want to see in the world, but for exemplifying peaceful responses to annoying situations. I belie my intent to make peace when I behave with intolerance or worse, without compassion.

The good news is, standing for peace every day raises my awareness to the minute and varied ways I can bring more peace to my life, and that brings me a little closer to the vision of The Village of Ordinary and the respect the villagers show for one another and for peoples far beyond their village. That's a good thing.

If you feel inspired to stand for peace a few minutes a day, I encourage you to Tweet about it and use the hashtag #5minutes. By Mother's Day next year, perhaps there will be millions of us standing for peace in our homes and gardens, churches and parks, and on the steps of City Hall.

My gratitude to Flickr member tomeppy for making the image above available under Creative Commons 2.0 Generic license.

The Return of Nutrition, or does your tomato splat and split when it falls?

2009-06-21T07:08:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Last week, blogger Ryan Harb, a budding permaculturist, posted an article on The Return of Nutrition (pdf file). The article begins: Did you ever wonder why today's supermarket-purchased fruits taste like mostly water?

I know I have. I was fortunate during my daughters' early childhood to provide them with fresh, organic fruits and vegetables from our small garden. They may still have body memories of the rich flavors, textures and juice of the apples, pears, berries, tomatoes, and many vegetables we grew together. Thanks to their grandmother, who brought a seedling from her favorite peach tree shortly after their father and I married, every autumn we gathered more succulent, sweet, fragrant peaches than we could possibly eat. The juice ran down our arms when we bit into them, so good we licked it off shamelessly, rather than lose a drop.

Many children then and many more children now have no idea that a true peach is not hard and crunchy like an apple, but soft and squirty with juice. Nor do they know the acidic deliciousness of ripe tomato, nearly bursting from its thin skin. If a small child, gnoshing sun-heated tomatoes from the vine let one slip through her fingers when I was growing up, it split, spilling its seeds and fluid on impact, however soft the soil. How long has it been since you last dropped a tomato--supermarket-bought, organic, or farmer's market--only to watch it thump to the floor with nary a dent?

Bringing back good-tasting produce is more than a mission to satisfy the senses, according to The Return of Nutrition author. It's a mission to feed our bodies foods rich in the nutrients we need to thrive, fight disease and live long. The answer is in the soil.

You see, as Big Agriculture has co-opted ever larger tracts--square mile after square mile--of land to monoculture food-growing factories, fueled by petrochemical fertilizers, antibiotics and tons of pesticides, the soil in which the crops are grown has become merely a holding material, it's own rich nutrients systematically stripped away.

The people of the Real Food Campaign and Remineralize the Earth, both featured in The Return of Nutrition, seek to replenish our depleted soils that we may once again taste foods rich with vitamins and minerals, trace elements, bright colors and the flavors and juices some of us are fortunate enough to remember. I encourage you to take time to read the article.

Reclaiming our soils is a matter of survival for our species, and not only ours. Many of the animals with whom we share the planet are as dependent as we on the nutritive qualities of our soils. Without good soil their habitats, already diminished by ever-expanding human settlement, are less and less fertile, increasing their exposure to disease and possibly hastening extinction.

There's more, and it's good. Imagine simple fruits and vegetables so mouthwatering delicious that we don't need heavy sauces or sugary concoctions to make them palatable. Imagine food so satisfying that we experience no residual cravings and leave that post-dinner pint of ice cream in the freezer without regret or feeling of sacrifice. Imagine the colors, scents and textures of food so pleasurable that cooking and dining became a family affair again, the nightly meal a time of energetic discussion and creativity.

It is no accident that food is an integral part of the vision of the Village of Ordinary. Villagers take direct responsibility for their health and well-being, and much of that depends on the foods with which they fuel and nourish their bodies. More, they genuinely enjoy the time they spend together preparing and eating meals.

I'll be researching and posting my findings on food often in the coming weeks and months. Not only is a local, sustainable model important to the story, but some climate researchers feel that reclaiming our soils and returning to smaller, family-style agriculture may be the single most important way to slow global climate change and ensure plenty of fresh drinking water for generations to come. Our food source and supply is that important.

So important, in fact, is this issue that I urge you to delve deep and engage in dialogue with me, with your family and friends and with your elected officials. Some of our most foremost and respected scientists believe we need to solve these problems by 2020. That's just eleven short years from now. Others think that's an optimistic figure. One thing is certain. There is no time to waste, so please share your own food journey and resources in the comments section below.

Ordinary Hero: Katie McKenna

2009-06-18T01:35:00.000-07:00

The visiting nurse told Peace Corps volunteer Katie McKenna that her Guatemalan village of Chuisac had one of the highest rates of childhood diarrhea in the region. The cause: Inadequate sanitation facilities. As many as fourteen people in the village of 140 families shared a single latrine. Lacking proper toilets, children frequently defecated in their yards and patios. Desperate to save their children and improve overall health, the villagers planned to build a latrine for every household that did not have one--about one hundred. Cost per latrine was $150, and the villagers could provide half that in labor and materials.

Water Charity, a non-profit organization with a mission to provide clean water and sanitation to people who don't have it, learned about Katie's work with the village and offered to provide the additional funding.

While Katie and the villagers worked to dig and begin building the latrines, Water Charity raised the remaining funds, one small donation at a time. Katie pulled a substantial portion of the funds herself, hitting up family and friends back in the States.

Water Charity credits Katie's determination and perseverance for the success of the program.

In many cases, we have 13 people currently using 1 latrine, and the picture of the men building the latrine is in a house where there is NO latrine. They had the hole dug, but they didn't have the money to buy the little house around it and the seat.

These families worked day and night to get the holes and latrines done, digging holes 23 to 50 feet deep! It is scary work in a hole that deep and narrow. For the latrine you see being built, the family went down 120 feet!!

Water Charity Progress Report
on Katie M's Latrines

All told, Katie and the villagers built 91 latrines. They also educated the children on safety and hygiene practices.

The faces of one family, shown here standing in front of their new toilet, tell us exactly how important this asset is to their lives.

It is easy in our land of plenty, where many of us enjoy multiple bathrooms in our homes, complete with hot and cold running water, to forget the enormity of sanitary waste disposal. We flush, wash and go. For billions of people elsewhere, a simple toilet can be the difference between life and death.

According to the United Nations World Health Organization, every year there are 1.6 million diarrheal deaths related to unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene—the vast majority among children under 5.
Water Charity

For giving selflessly of her time, energy, skills and talents as a volunteer in the United States Peace Corps; for working respectfully with the villagers of Chuisac in their quest to improve the health of their children; for building cooperation through partnership with local Guatemalan organizations as well as international organizations such as Water Charity; for providing a perfect example of a conscious and conscientious member of our world village, and thereby bringing the Village of Ordinary a little closer to reality, the Ordinary Heroes Award is kindly offered to Katie McKenna with humble gratitude.

Image credits: Images of Katie and the villagers courtesy Water Charity. Used with permission.

Ordinary Heroes will return next week

2009-06-12T10:52:00.001-07:00

Too sick with flu last few days to post, folks, but will return as soon as possible. In the meantime, would love to hear from you how you are making your life a little more Ordinary these days.

What the guy with no arms and no legs said to the high school kids

2009-06-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes life throws us a rotten tomato. It's easy to blame external circumstances when we fail to meet our goals. Sometimes we live down to others' expectations of us. Sometimes we collapse into a debilitating depression, unable perhaps even to get out of bed. Nick Vujicic had every reason to give up on life from the get-go, but he didn't. Look at his face. Listen to his voice.

People say to me, "How can you smile?" ... Then they realize "There’s got to be something more to life than meets the eye if a guy without arms and legs is living a fuller life than I am."
Nick Vujicic
Attitude is Altitude

Whatever you think is keeping you down, isn't. You're keeping yourself down. Get up. It's the Ordinary thing to do.

Watch Home, please

2009-06-05T17:42:00.000-07:00

Today is World Environment Day.

Listen to me, please. ... Listen carefully to this extraordinary story, which is yours, and decide what you want to do with it.
Film's Narrator, Glenn Close

This is the trailer. For the full video, click through to YouTube. It's an hour and thirty-three minutes in length, so get comfy. I'm watching it as I write this. You and I are the stars. Only seventeen minutes in, and the scenery and story are equally beautiful. Looks like lots of people are watching tonight, as the feed is rather slow.

I'll update this post after I've seen the whole thing. Let me know if you watch it, won't you?

Gratitude to Tweep @kalsing for posting the link to blogger Mashable's post featuring the video.

Ordinary Hero: Christine Nielson

2009-06-04T23:10:00.000-07:00

Watch this.

Who knew that a simple act, such as choosing organic cotton over conventionally grown cotton, could save lives? Christine Nielson knew--and did something about it. A former school teacher who had helped indigenous women in Mexico use traditional skills to raise their standard of living, Nielson developed the entrepreneurial "fire in the belly" when she visited the cotton fields of her friend Sally Fox. Fox is a hero in her own right. She revolutionized the cotton industry when she developed plants that grew long-fiber colored cotton, reducing the need for bleach.

Nielson saw Fox's beautiful, cotton in earthy, natural colors as an environmentally sound and humane alternative and founded Coyuchi. Its mission, according to Coyuchi's Joanne Sims, in Hope & Luxury: To stop the production of conventionally grown cotton.

From the beginning our mission was to work with sustainable agriculture. Organic and fair trade means these farmers are paid an extra amount and it gives them a meaningful improvement in the quality of life.
Christine Nielson in Marin Independent Journal

Cotton is the most heavily sprayed crop on the planet. Doing an organic cotton bedding line is a way of offering people a quality product, as well as--since sheets are big and heavy and use a lot of fiber--making a substantial contribution to pollution reduction.
Christine Nielson, as quoted in
SF Gate/Organic Materials

Frequently cited as the first company to manufacture organic cotton fabric for commercial use, Coyuchi launched a line of luxurious organic bedding and bath products and placed them strategically in upscale boutiques and shops, where trendy patrons couldn't get enough. Leveraging the growing demand for her products, Nielson forged exclusive relationships with mills and growers in India. Demand continued to grow, enough that prices came down to within reach of ordinary people like you and me.

In its December 2007, issue, Ode Magazine asked Nielson: What can make growing organic cotton sustainable for the farmers? Her reply was simple:

Only with the added benefit and support of fair-trade certification can organic cotton farming work over the long haul. The higher price for organic cotton in addition to the premium for fair-trade certification assures more returns. Half of the fair-trade premium goes to farmers’ committees and will be utilized for projects that benefit the community, such as setting up schools and providing drinking water.

In providing Westerners with gorgeous comforters and sheets, pesticide-free crib bedding on which to lay our baby's heads, and luxuriously soft towels in the bath, Nielson gave nearly destitute cotton farmers in India, many of whom were already sickened from exposure to insecticides they used on their conventional cotton crops, a hand up and hope for a much brighter future. How did she do it? By giving them a market for cotton fibers grown in the traditional--and organic--way, as they had grown them for thousands of years.

If you watched the The Conventional Trap at the beginning of this post, you'll be heartened to learn what Coyuchi and its partners have achieved in Growing Back to Organic, here.

Not only did Nielson pay more for organic cotton than GMO prices (Note: Due to lower yields in early years, returns are about even with GMO returns, but expected to increase as the soil is replenished.), but in partnership with Solidaridad and the Chetna Organic Farmers Association, she helped bring fair trade practices to the farms, insuring that workers are treated humanely and compensated fairly.

Also with the Chetna Organic Farmers Association, she helped initiate the Livestock & Field Infrastructure Development Project, which she dubbed "The Cow Project," according to OrganicStyle, which explains the project here.

It Takes Six Villages/The Cow Project
Although Chetna trains and supports its members in organic growing practices, the farmers are missing some essentials - most importantly, livestock. Cows and bullocks provide the manure for making compost; their urine is collected, fermented, and applied to cotton plants as a concentrated soure [sic] of nitrogen and natural pesticide. Meanwhile, the cows' milk supplements family diets and provides an additional source of income. On average, the calves born each year contribute more than 3,000 rupees, or $75, to the the groups of farmers and their families.
Together, Chetna and Coyuchi have developed a pilot program with the aim of acquiring 91 cows and constructing 10 cowsheds for six villages as well as building shelters to help lengthen their life expectancy.

Nielson did not stop with the farmers, however. She partnered with fair-trade mills to ensure their workers were also compensated fairly, without discrimination, and that dyes and finishes are safe. Your baby, sleeping on a Coyuchi crib sheet, will never inhale residual formaldehyde, for example, which is used in most conventional cotton products.

This year, Nielson sold Coyuchi to Organic Style, Ltd. "I didn't have the fire in the belly anymore to want to keep investing tremendous amounts of energy into commerce," Nielson told Organic Bouquet's Clark Merrefield.

The work Nielson began will continue under the leadership of Organic Style's founder and CEO, Gerald Prolman. Says Prolman, "You've got six thousand growers in India that are counting on us to sell their goods. I'm going to scream the Coyuchi message as long as I'm running this company."

For changing the way we think about organic products, for providing us with beautiful bed and bath linens made of sustainably grown, harvested, milled and shipped fibers, for saving lives, for improving the quality of life for textile laborers from field to packaged goods, for helping farmers to earn a better living, safely, while replenishing the soil upon which we all depend, for going beyond her company's needs and working with local organizations to provide safe drinking water and livestock for food and crop management, for caring about the earth and the generations to come at home and abroad, and for bringng the vision of the Village of Ordinary a little closer to reality, the Ordinary Heroes award is kindly offered to Christine Nielson with deep gratitude.

For more about organic cotton, including links to numerous organic cotton products and suppliers, ranging from baby toys and crib blankets to high fashion white shirts for men and yummy fashions for women, visit my Squidoo lens, Why Buy Organic Cotton. For more on the effects of conventional cotton growing on the lives of growers, see the PBS documentary, The Dying Fields, on the cotton farmer suicide epidemic in India.

Heart blessings

2009-05-30T14:31:00.000-07:00

Sometimes something so beautiful comes along that it stirs the heart--deep, pure, blessed. This is one of those moments.

Julian Smith won third place in the 2009 Britain's Got Talent competition today (The winning performance is not yet posted on YouTube; this is the audition that got him to the semi-finals.) I hope and pray we all have many more opportunities to hear this amazing musician.

In the world of Ordinary, children are encouraged to develop their talents and share them with society. There, like Rose's partner Cheyenne, a musician such as Julian would spend the majority of his time making music, just as Rose gardens, Janine cooks and Noah documents and catalogs village life.

The world will be far richer when each of us can devote our best time to our best talent, don't you think? Whose hearts are you blessing with your gifts today?

Ordinary Hero: Alice Waters

2009-05-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

She's been called revolutionary.

She made a name for herself doing what she loved--cooking delicious, gorgeous food.

She introduced picked-same-day, locally grown fruits and vegetables in her dishes, because they taste best and have the most vibrant color, and started a fresh new cuisine that changed the way millions of us eat.

She used her earned fame to help launch a movement for slow food.

She takes a lot of flack for being outspoken as the link referenced here shows, but she led the campaign for an organic garden on the White House lawn, and First Lady Michelle Obama dug one.

She's been teaching children how to garden and cook since 1996, beginning with The Edible Schoolyard. Now she's lobbying the White House and Congress to plant an edible garden at every public school in the land. More, she's lobbying to get organic, locally grown, healthy food into free breakfast and lunch programs at every school.

You're gonna pay. You're either gonna pay up-front, or you're gonna pay out back. Do you know that one in two kids is gonna have diabetes? Let us subsidize real food instead of fast food. Let's feed every single child in school breakfast, lunch, and an afternoon snack, for free, and feed them real food.
As quoted by Eat Me Daily

Sparks flew at the Connecticut Forum's Food for Thought program May 14, where Alice Waters appeared with celebrity foodies Anthony Bourdain and Duff Goldman. Bourdain made a good point that people who cannot afford to pay seven dollars plus for a gallon of milk are unlikely to care where their milk comes from, so long as they can afford to give their children milk at all. Alice got that, and her response was equally provocative and, more importantly, a marvelous solution to a big chunk of the problem. Chef Duff Goldman made a keen point as well. It's all captured in this video. Take a look.

CAUTION: Two of the chefs speaking on this panel use profanity. Do not watch if four letter words offend you.

Who do you think is right?

Waters may be equally well-known for her political activism as for the delicious meals served up at her Berkeley Restaurant, Chez Panisse, which is almost as much a Bay Area tourist attraction as the Golden Gate bridge. (Among a slew of salivating visitors, @nguyenthuyviet tweeted on May 27 that she was planning "chez panisse reservations, renting bikes at gg park, a's vs o's tailgating, & ghost hunting" on an upcoming trip to the Bay Area.) But there's another aspect to Waters' work that is of vital importance to our collective future.

Sustainability has been a hallmark at Chez Panisse from the beginning. So important is this aspect, the restaurant posts their Commitment to Sustainability. Here's part of it.

We seek farmers who know their seeds and soil, ranchers who care about the food their livestock eats, winemakers who know what their grapes have known, fish merchants who are concerned about the health of the seas. To them we add kitchen and wait staff who care about the material of their work, knowing they will enjoy and take pride in the technical expertise they add to it. We reaffirm our commitment to all this, knowing that it is central to both the deepest and the most joyous of human activities: generosity, companionship, nourishment, growth.

For doing what she loves, for building on what she loves, for using her best talents and skills to help others, and for creating positive change through action, persuasion and deed, the Ordinary Heroes award is kindly offered to Chef Alice Waters with deep gratitude for deepening the vision and widening the path to the Village of Ordinary.

Saving ourselves, saving the planet

2009-05-23T12:02:00.000-07:00

Thirsty? A recent Harvard study indicates that when we quench our thirst with bottled water, we increase the bisphenol A (BPA) in our bodies two-thirds as fast as when we drink from a reusable stainless steel bottle. Taking care of the environment is so often linked with taking care of ourselves, don't you think? It's the Ordinary thing to do.

With gratitude to @MBHolistic for her/his 5/22 Tweet that highlighted the U.S. News and World Report article linked here.

Ordinary Hero: Marion Nestle

2009-05-21T07:15:00.000-07:00

If The Personal is Political,* there is little more personal than the food we eat. Yet Americans entrust our food supply almost entirely to big (really big) business. Wholesome, bucolic images of rosy-cheeked farmers jauntily pitching hay while black and white cows graze amiably in green pastures blaze from our television screens, magazines, newspapers and yes, on our blogs and web pages, but the truth about the food we eat is seldom close to these pastoral images.

Marion Nestle (pronounced Ness-ul) has been working to pluck the wool from our collective eyes since 1976. Food is political, she says, and if we are to protect our own health and the health of future generations, we need to get this and vote with our dollars every time we push a cart through the aisles of our local supermarket.

Her three books, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health,Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorismand What to Eatare more than enough to win her the Ordinary Hero award, but it's something she did last week that brought her to focus today.

She had been nominated to the Smart Choices board of directors. Smart Choices is going to put a zippy little green check mark on the packages of food that meet its criteria for healthy, wholesome food. They'll also tell us how many calories are in a serving of that food and how many servings are in the package. Sounds cool, huh? This might seem a prestigious and appropriate post for a woman whose entire adult life has been in the service of working to assure our food supply is safe and as healthy as possible.

Marion Nestle declined the nomination. She declined the nomination because Smart Choices "is a food industry-initiated plan to put a check mark--a stamp of approval--on processed food products that meet certain nutritional criteria," criteria that, upon scrutiny, she felt, did not provide the reassurance promised in that little green check mark.

The studies that food producers support tend to minimize health concerns associated with their products.
U.S. News and World in interview with
Marion Nestle and David Ludwig

To understand better why Marion Nestle doesn't trust that green check mark, check out 10 Things the Food Industry Doesn't Want You to Know, including item 2: "The studies that food producers support tend to minimize health concerns associated with their products."

Dr. Nestle places the blame for America's obesity epidemic squarely on the shoulders of Wall Street and its demand that corporations show ever increasing quarterly returns. She makes a fair and lively case for it in this video titled Food Politics filmed at the Alworth Center for Peace and Justice. Dr. Nestle doesn't take the podium until around four minutes in, and the visual is fairly monotonous, so I recommend that you grab a cuppa and a biscuit and sit down with a jigsaw puzzle or your favorite mindless computer game while you listen. She's definitely worth your time and I guarantee you'll come away with something interesting for the water cooler tomorrow.

For a lifetime of watching out for the quality and safety of our food, for standing up to the corporate giants again and again and again, and for teaching us how to find safe, healthy food (see How to Find Green Fish, How to Buy Organic Milk, How to Buy Green Produce), and in doing so, helping us all get a little closer to the world of the Village of Ordinary, the Ordinary Heroes award is kindly offered to Marion Nestle.

Learn more about Marion Nestle on her web site and keep up to date on the latest at the intersection of food and politics on her blog.

Thanks to Tweep @AmiraElgan for introducing me to Marion Nestle through her May 12 tweet "HERO ALERT: Nutrition professor tells why she declined nutrition society's nomination to head a prestigious program. http://bit.ly/Mo7NM."

*With a bow and a nod to Carol Hanisch, Shulie Firestone, Anne Koedt and Kathie Sarachild.

Hold your own

2009-05-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes there's no easy alternative, but even if you don't care about the BPA levels leaching into your bottled drinking water, you'll enjoy this video by a hip kid on why you just might want to switch to your own reusable bottle.

His name is Gavin Erskine and he's my idea of an Ordinary kid.

My thanks to Oakleigh, where I first spotted this video, and to The Soft Landing. for their article on BPA in water bottles.

Here's what happened

2009-05-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

I'm on the bus at 5:59 p.m. when my phone gongs. I jump, as I do every night, startled by the sound, forgetting momentarily: It's time to stand for peace. We're less than a minute from the next stop, so I wait and get off the bus. It happens to be one of San Francisco's busiest intersections.

There's no good place to stand where my back can be against a wall, so I face the traffic. I feel vulnerable. I like a wall against my back. Cars, bicycles, people! So much rush-rush. It's Friday night, and we're all in a hurry to get to wherever.

Rush-rush. I forget the wind whipping my hair into my eyes, nostrils, across my mouth. I, the crowd-phobe, am happy in the midst of all this bustle. I feel the Buddha smile on my face. Before I know it, the gong sounds on my phone, signaling my five minutes is up. Have I learned anything new tonight? No matter. It is a gorgeous evening, and I am going to walk home.

Three blocks later, waiting to cross another of San Francisco's ultra-busy intersections, I see this sign: Learn Peace. Four or five people are holding signs: Embrace Peace. Make Peace. Peace not war. I'm suddenly in the Sixties again. No wait! That's me! I stand for peace! These people are standing for peace. I ask the guy holding the sign if I can take a picture of it. Sure! Would he mind if I joined them for a bit? Sure! There's more signs over there if you'd like one.

I pick up a sign that says simply, Peace, and join the others on the corner. I lift the sign and smile to see that the other side says Teach. Back and forth, I wag my sign. Teach. Peace. Teach. Peace.

Drivers honk and give us the thumbs up. One waves the two-fingered peace sign through the sun roof of his Beamer. More people show up, grab signs. Kat introduces herself. She's carrying a clipboard. She and Dave, the guy with the Learn Peace sign, wanted to do something, so they started this vigil. Every third Friday of the month, they stand on this corner from 6-8 p.m. Other people show up. Some of them sign up for an e-mail reminder. No pressure. That's what the clip board is for, if I'm interested. Folks come and stand for as long as they're comfortable. That woman over there is another Kate. She knows lots of people in lots of organizations working for peace. That woman, Susan, on the bicycle, is pretty new. She just started showing up.

Kat, Dave, Kate, Susan and another guy whose name I didn't get are all fiftyish-sixtyish, like me. There are a couple of young people sitting against a tree, holding signs.

Susan introduces herself to me. We exchange a few pleasantries, then silence. I remember my stand the other night--that I don't know my neighbors, that I need to work again at overcoming my shyness. I'm not very good at making conversation, I tell Susan. I realize I should ask you something like, where do you work. That's all it takes. She's not that interested in telling me about her work, but she is excited about taking small actions like this one. She's been to a few others. What's most on her mind is the East Bay event a couple of weeks ago where she heard Alice Walker. She's my favorite author, she says. So. Imagine that. I now know another person who loves Alice Walker's writings as much as I do.

More people come and take up signs. Susan takes off on her bike. I give gratitude for every driver who encourages us with their horns and shouts for peace. I give gratitude for each of the people here, coming out to stand, not part of any organization, just standing for peace. Wait! Dolores introduces herself, hands me a brochure. She's part of Iraq Moratorium. I've never heard of them, but I'll look them up online this weekend, I tell her. She has gorgeous white hair. I love older people with a sense of purpose and commitment, who haven't given up despite all we've seen, don't you?

My stomach growls. My feet hurt. I take Kat at her word. People come and go during the two hours as meets their needs. I trek home, leaving behind about twice as many people standing for peace as were there when I first spotted them.

That's what happened on my sixth night of standing for peace. I feel like the Village of Ordinary is all around me. What do you think?

Ordinary Hero: Seth Godin

2009-05-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

They call him a marketing guru. Sit with his bio for two minutes, and you'll see why. He markets himself pretty well, don't you think? But that's not why he's an Ordinary Hero.

This is why.

For challenging us to be leaders, for teaching us how to lead, for giving us tools with which to lead, and for showing us that we are already part of a tribe, Seth Godin is this week's Ordinary Hero. Thank you, Seth.

In the next 24 hours, create a movement. Something that matters. Start. Do it. We need it.
Seth Godin

Get out there.

Can five minutes a day make a difference in your life?

2009-05-13T18:26:00.000-07:00

Today marks the fourth day in a row I've dropped everything at 6:00 p.m. to stand for peace, and I can answer that with a big, fat "Yes!" If you want peace in your life, I recommend it. Oh, pshaw, you may say, it's only five minutes. That's right! It's only five minutes What have you got to lose?

Here's what happened.

This is the view outside the window where I stood yesterday and Monday. I was visiting my daughter and her family. I spend quite a bit of time there, helping to care for their little one. The image doesn't show the shimmering glow on the swaying trees, the constant traffic buzzing and whirring, or the people hurrying by on foot fighting the wind one direction, pushed along by it the other. Nor can you see the fellow cleaning the second-story windows inside and out that brown house across the street. I don't know his name.

Though I spend a good deal of time in this neighborhood, I don't know the neighbors. Many do not return my greeting when I meet them on the street. One guy hollered at me for taking pictures of his pretty flowers one day. Yes, these flowers. I love their fresh beauty and vibrant color against the falling-down PG&E sign and trapped litter. I feel such gratitude for the hearts and hands that plant and tend tiny gardens in the midst of so much hardscape.

Standing in this window for five minutes, taking in one breath after another and asking myself for peace, asking Spirit to help me make peace in the world, I am aware, more keenly than ever, of the difference between my life and the vision of the Village of Ordinary. If I am to create peace through community, somehow I need to overcome my shyness and find a way to meet the people with whom I share space, whether it is here on this street, or at home on my own, where I stood tonight.

Peacemaking requires respect for all parties, including ourselves.

Our neighborhood bustles in the evening. Rush, rush, rush. People chat at the neighborhood coffee shop. I hear laughter. A couple of dogs greet each other with barks and friendly nips. What I am most aware of, though, is the pain in my body, a direct result of the abuse I've given it today. Where will I find the strength to continue to dream and build Ordinary if I do not care for my body properly? All too typically, I snacked on leftover Mother's Day goodies instead of eating balanced meals, failed to drink enough fluids, and sat for far too many hours at the computer without exercise. At my age, joints, muscles and innards tend to respond to neglect with aches and sometimes screaming pain. How can I hope to make peace in the world if I treat myself with such disrespect? Peacemaking requires respect for all parties, including ourselves.

The first rules of waging peace: Respect yourself. Set boundaries and honor them. Take care of yourself that you retain strength and stamina for the long haul.

Five minutes

2009-05-10T18:08:00.000-07:00

There's no time like the present to begin a new habit, so yeah, though I stood for peace earlier today, I set my phone to tone a bell one minute before six each evening. When it went off, I was surprised, momentarily forgetting what it was about. My sweetheart and I were watching a video. It's about a man who has endured grave injustice. All the people in his life are affected one way and another. The acting is very good.

Standing in my bedroom, I tried to be present with the golden evening sunlight illuminating houses on the hill. My left shoulder was painful with tension, my hands in loose fists. My brain felt tight against my skull, and I was full of the pained and strained faces of the video, their suffering so visible. My heart hurt, but not with the delicious feeling of the morning sky. It really hurt this time. I felt squeezed.

This is what I do for entertainment and relaxation--watch a fictional story of a terrible miscarriage of justice. Judging by the state of my body, this is not healthy R&R. For most of the five minutes, I had to focus on my breathing, as in the Ten Minute Meditation, just to reach a state of peace. The time was short, but I feel calmer now. Pain in shoulder gone. I'm forgoing the rest of the video.

I stood for peace--II

2009-05-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

Today is the second Mother's Day I stood for peace on a San Francisco hill, looking across a sunny expanse of grass and city scape to a nearly cloudless sky so blue it made my heart hurt. You know that feeling? Goodness.

The chain link fence surrounding the park reminded me of all the prisoners locked behind fences and doors around the world. It would be easy to collapse in hopelessness at the thought of the heavy hands and sadistic hearts that brutalize children, women and anyone who has something someone else wants, or whose beliefs differ from those of the person with the whip.

What came back to me, again and again as the wind brought fresh air to my lungs and cooled my face, was the image of Sharon Mehdi's grandmothers standing silently all day long, saying not a word, moving not an inch. (How did those menopausal bladders hold up all those hours?) Thousands of women and men joining them all over the world. Children everywhere, of every age putting down their rifles, their bayonets, their bazookas and, perhaps, their bomb-laden backpacks and saying no to violence.

Yes we can. Yes we can stop the violence. Oh sure, you're thinking five minutes on a windy hill all by myself once a year does nothing, right? Yup, standing last year, I wondered the same thing. But it's still true: Peace begins at home.

Throughout the year, whenever I have responded with anger to a situation--and there have been many times--I remembered my tiny five-minute Mother's Day stand for peace. I remembered how hopeless I felt at the rage, power and greed that human beings indulge in the service of harming others. I knew that if I expected those people somehow to make peace in their hearts and lives, I first must make it in mine in this moment at this time. Could it be as simple as exchanging a momentary irritation for kindness?

Have I succeeded? Not immediately, not every time. Making peace is a work in progress. Right now, I am in a state of discord with a family member. Each day, I spend too much energy working through negative feelings, seeking compassion and understanding. Yet I remain judgmental, resisting. Repeatedly, I must sit with my feelings, acknowledge them, process the difference between my responses and my intent to make peace. I am old enough to know that I am not alone in experiencing this. Perhaps you experience this. Millions of us across the globe want to make peace in our families, our work places, and the world at large.

So as I stood on that hill today, I knew that I do not want to be standing alone next year. On Mother's Day 2010, I want some of you who dream of peace standing there with me. Oh, and I want so much more. I want to stand in a park filled with people--hundreds, perhaps thousands of people standing silently for peace for five minutes. No speeches, no bands, no placards, no hoopla. Just people walking one by one, in twos and threes, whole families, to their neighborhood parks and standing silently for five minutes of peace, mingling afterward to share their feelings about standing in community with this one common goal: Making peace.

I want to stand in a park filled with people--hundreds, perhaps thousands of people standing silently for peace for five minutes.

Imagine millions of people, all over the earth, remembering all year long how it felt to stand for five minutes, breathing peace. Imagine them changing their lives at home, at work, at school, in committee, waiting in line, driving down the freeway. Imagine choosing peace instead of anger. Choosing common ground instead of discord. Choosing a smile instead of a finger. (You know what I mean.) Imagine how that daily consciousness might spread.

How to get from here to there?

I will start. For the next year, I will stand for peace five minutes of every day. Wherever I am at 6:00 p.m. each evening, I will stand for peace. If I am with people, I will excuse myself, leave the room and stand for peace. If I am riding the bus, I will leave my seat (increasingly, as I age, I am lucky enough to have one), grab a pole and stand for peace. If I am caring for my granddaughter, I will do everything possible in that moment to stand for peace. If it is not possible, I will tell her about peace and why it is so important to devote that five minutes to peace. She may not understand, but I will share it all the same.

It's a little scary making this commitment. I've rarely been on time in my life. I've kept few rituals and never at the same time every single day for a whole year, so I'm asking for your support. I need your encouragement. As often as I can, I'll write a little blurb about the day's stand right here. I hope anyone reading this will post comments frequently. Your comments fuel me. Should you feel like taking a five minute stand for peace yourself now and then, I hope you'll tell me about it and how you felt about it. If you're a blogger or a Tweeter, I hope you'll start a conversation about standing for peace. On our tweets, we can use the hashtag #5minutes. Together, we can make a difference in the world, one moment of kindness, one smile, one prayer, and five minutes a time.

Will I see you in my neighborhood next year? Or read about you standing in yours?

The images in this post were taken on the way to and from the park today. The signs, new in this children's garden, were serendipitously on point, don't you think?

Stand for peace on Mother's Day

2009-05-09T15:12:00.000-07:00

Women standing for peace. Tomorrow women all over the world will stand for peace for the third Mother's Day in a row.

Image courtesy standingwomen.org

There is probably nothing any of us wish for our children more than peace. Sharon Mehdi's delightful tale,The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering, inspires us on a visceral level. Somehow we get the power of this silent gesture. When we read the story, we feel it in our bodies. We know that standing silently, one by one, is enough.

Spare five minutes and stand for peace with your family and friend's at 1 PM tomorrow your local time. That's all it takes. This explains why.

Though a year old, the primal necessity of the message has not changed, don't you agree?

Five minutes of silence. Stand alone. Stand with your family and friends. Stand on the courthouse steps. Stand in your backyard. Bring a bell to mark the beginning of your stand and the end. Afterward, use your action as a springboard for discussion with your loved ones. How much do you want peace in the world? Tell us about it in the comments section below.

Maybe what you'll ask for this Mother's Day is peace. That's the Ordinary thing to do.

Ordinary Hero: Sharon Mehdi

2009-05-09T13:29:00.000-07:00

Image copyright 2009
L. Kathryn Grace
All rights reserved

She wrote a story for her granddaughter, not yet born, about two grandmothers who stood for peace. She shared the story with some friends. They shared the story with their friends. The story begins like this.

On a buffety, blustery early summer day, when the news was bad and the sky turned yellow, a strange thing happened in the town where I live.
The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering: A Story for Anyone Who Thinks She Can't Save the World

Tomorrow, as we did last year and as thousands did the year before, women from all over the world will do a strange thing. For five short minutes, we will stand silently in parks, in churches, on public streets, on courthouse steps and statehouse steps, on mountaintops, at the seashore, next to rivers and in our own gardens. Like the grandmothers in the story, we will stand for peace.

For visioning a world of peace; for visioning that two silent women, dressed in comfortable shoes and their Sunday best could stand unmoving with one thought in mind; for visioning that women all over the world would understand the silence and the standing and the vision and join them, each in their village, town, city; and for visioning that sons and daughters everywhere in the world, in response to their mothers and grandmothers and sisters and aunties and cousins standing silently for peace would drop their weapons and choose peace; for making the vision of the Village of Ordinary a little more real, the Ordinary Heroes Award is offered with deepest gratitude to Sharon Mehdi. (Updated 5/10 with link to Mehdi's web page.)

Find out who is standing for peace in your area and join us.

New do

2009-05-06T06:32:00.000-07:00

If you're a regular reader, you can't help but notice the new face on the blog. I've been wanting to switch to three columns for a couple of years, and finally learned how to do it. I'll be tweaking off and on when I can grab a few minutes, so you may notice other changes along the way. What do you think so far?

Ordinary Hero: Michelle O'Neil

2009-04-30T07:15:00.000-07:00

Image copyright L. Kathryn Grace, 2009
All rights reserved

She's funny, poignant, involved, deep, light and a just plain good read. She's a registered nurse, a former radio reporter, a political activist, a writer. She's totally in love with her fella, whom she refers to as Hot Toddy.

A big shout out to my technical guy Todd O'Neil. Not only does he do all my computer stuff, but he's good smelling, warm, and doesn't hog all the covers.
My Technical Guy

Like so many of us, she resists disappearing into mommydom.

The pendent felt like a big blinking neon sign that read, MOTHER, NOTHING ELSE. Wasn’t the screaming baby attached to my body advertisment enough?
The Necklace

She writes a lot about her two children, Riley and Seth. Both are intelligent, funny, eager, loving, brave. With autism, Riley, the oldest, has a few more challenges than her little brother. O'Neil shares many of these with us, heartbreakingly so at times, and also the precious moments. On packing day, Mom is at her limits and sends Seth to his room for a time out, then sits back on the floor to calm herself. Riley climbs onto mom's lap, straddling her hips, and gives her mom softies.

The feel of my fingernails up and down her arms has always soothed her. It almost puts her in a trance. Now, she's trying to comfort me with them.
Softies

A shy friend, perhaps a bit reclusive, in an effort to expand her world has attended a Zumba dance class--that yummy, fast-paced, sexy workout. Zapped with the spirit of the moment, another student shouts exuberantly, "Charo-like". On the way home, in the car, exulting in her new freedom, the friend lets loose, Charo-like, over and over. O'Neil celebrates.

When we free ourselves, we give others permission to do the same.
Work it girl!

Taking the kids in for shots can be a hassle at best any time, right? Try it with a child with autism. Then get a clinic who understands how to work with children, who prearranges for you to take your children past the registration desk, avoiding the wait, and greets the children with smiles, music headphones, dancing, joking. Both children are at ease when the shots come.

Special needs parents have so much gratitude for the kindness of strangers.

People are good

She shares the things she learns that help her cope, gain insights, make peace, if only for ten minutes.

I want to tell you about a meditation I sometimes do. ... You start where you are, and go back chronologically in age. ...
Fade to black

She celebrates her daughter's wisdom far beyond her years, beyond many adults of any age.

"It's okay little guy. It's okay if you die, 'cause you just go straight back to God. Don't worry, okay? Everybody dies."
Riley, speaking to a sick baby squirrel in Everybody dies

She uses what she learns from her past, with regret at behavior born of ignorance and perhaps a certain unconsciousness, to educate those in her community with a receptive bent and, just possibly, win a few playdates for her daughter.

I just keep thinking about Besty. Wishing I had handled it differently. Wishing I had known more. Wishing I had been a better person. I am ashamed I didn't allow myself the gift her friendship would have been.

It would also be a shame for the little girls in our neighborhood to miss out on the opportunity to know Riley.

The more we know, the better we do.
Playdates and regret

For these reasons and so many more, Michelle O'Neil of Full Soul Ahead is the Ordinary Hero of the week. Thank you, Michelle, for sharing so much of your life, for giving so fully and intelligently, for being exactly who you are, an ordinary woman living an extraordinary life.

I encourage any one reading this to immerse yourself in Full Soul Ahead. Learn. Laugh. Love more. Michelle shows us all a bit more of the vision of Ordinary.

Ordinary Hero: Van Jones

2009-04-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

Image copyright L. Kathryn Grace, 2009
All rights reserved

Seven months ago, when I first wrote about him, Van Jones was promoting green jobs and a green economy for the blue collar worker.

We need a green economy that honors the earth ... but not a green economy only for the eco-chic. ... The people who are struggling for bus fare--they have a place too.
Van Jones, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

That alone is enough to warrant the Ordinary Heroes award. There's so much more. If it's green, if it's the economy, if it's jobs, Jones is there, showing us how we can lift ourselves and help others lift themselves from poverty to prosperity, slow human-caused climate change and protect our environment in the bargain. In fact, he's shown up twice more here, on Realizing Ordinary, in I'm ready for the green economy--Are you? and in Pinning our hopes on youth.

Hear what he has to say.

We are just now at the beginning of this green wave of new technologies that are environmentally friendly, and that green wave now has to be designed to lift all boats.
Van Jones

A 1993 Yale graduate, "serially successful social entrepreneur", and author of the New York Times best seller The Green Collar Economy:to cite just a few of his accomplishments, Jones is now President Obama's green-jobs czar at the White House, a decision that marks the level of the president's commitment to building a greener economy.

That's exciting. Even more exciting, though, is the hand Jones gives to the most impoverished of our nation and how hard he is working especially to help youth of color to a piece of the American dream.

We can't just keep sending our children away to funeral homes and prisons.

A Tennessee native with keen entrepreneurial savvy, Jones could have done anything with his life. He chose to devote his incredible talent, energy, charisma and intelligence to stopping violence and near-rite-of-passage imprisonment for our nation's youth of color. Three years out of college, he co-founded, with Diana Frappier, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996. In direct disproportion to society, our overcrowded prisons are stuffed with blacks and Latinos. That fact alone makes crime and the prosecution of crime in this country a matter of human rights. Jones sought to change those statistics by changing the lives of the people behind them.

He is perhaps the first to articulate on the national level that more than schooling and jobs are required to change a community from one filled with drive-by shootings, funerals and revolving prison doors to one filled with picket fences, school books and cookies in the oven. Because the poorest of us grow up in the most marginalized communities, often built over landfills and toxic waste dumps, children develop asthma and other chemically-induced diseases in greater proportion than children of affluent neighborhoods. It's not enough to give people a hand up; we need to help clean up.

Jones is committed to cleaning up the toxic mess we made in the last two centuries, and preventing its occurrence in the future--a matter of life and death for poor children.

The next big play in the economy is going to be greening the economy, turning away from the suicide economy to a sustainable economy. Let's make sure those communities that were locked out of the last century's pollution-based economy are gonna be locked in to this new clean and green economy.

For his commitment to ending poverty and endemic racism through the development of environmentally safe industry and for using his passion, energy, intelligence and love to help the poorest of us build prosperous lives while reclaiming the fresh, wholesome beauty of our Earth and preserving our soil, water, air and natural world for generations to come, this week's Ordinary Heroes award is offered to Van Jones with deepest gratitude.

Happy Earth Day everyone!

2009-04-22T00:01:00.000-07:00

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

Isn't she beautiful? I'm old enough to remember the first Earth Day in 1970. Are you? In honor of Earth Day, I measured my ecological footprint today.

If everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need 1.83 Earths to support us all. That's down slightly from the last time I took the quiz, but not by much.

If I want to live in the bounteous and never wasteful world of Ordinary, I must be more conscious of my choices. Everything I do either works toward creating a world more like Ordinary or less. Over the next year, I'll take steps to reduce my eco-print. Here are some of the things I know I can do:

Walk further before I get on the bus each morning and evening (good for my health as well as the planet)
Purchase energy-saving Smart Stripsfor our home computers, television, radio, small appliances and cell-phone chargers
Learn about ways I can reduce water usage and save energy by changing my laundry habits
Defrost my refrigerator and freezer four times a year
Purchase renewable energy for our apartment
Join a garden co-op and grow my own veggies
Encourage my landlord to provide a green compost bin (Will it save him $$?)

That's enough for starters. There are plenty more options for reducing my footprint, once I've accomplished these.

Will you join me? What's the next action you plan to reduce your ecological footprint?

Earth Day 2009: Just one thing

2009-04-21T02:05:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Rocketboom, for making this 2007 video.

Trash cans are rare in the world of Ordinary. How is that possible?

Ordinary Hero: Paul Gillespie

2009-04-16T07:15:00.000-07:00

Image copyright L. Kathryn Grace, 2009
All rights reserved

Drivers of hybrid fuel taxis in San Francisco are pocketing $9,000 a year in fuel savings, thanks to Paul Gillespie, says Hybrid Cars. If you've wondered how long a hybrid battery would last in real road conditions, they don't get much more of a beating than they'll find on the hilly streets of San Francisco where all but two of the hybrid fleet have logged nearly 300,000 miles without a battery issue since they hit the road in 2003.

"Ford never really intended this vehicle to be used as a taxi," Gillespie said as he tooled around the city's hilly Pacific Heights neighborhood in the silent hybrid. "We adopted it because I was desperate to find a vehicle that would save drivers fuel costs and save greenhouse gas emissions."
Los Angeles Times

According to the Los Angeles Times in San Francisco's hybrid taxis prove their worth, fourteen percent, or approximately 200 of San Francisco's 1,438 taxis are hybrids. They're saving drivers money, helping keep San Francisco's skies blue, lessening the amount of traffic-caused pollution that blows to the East Bay, and giving us all a quieter ride.

For his persistence in advocating the adoption of hybrids into the San Francisco taxi fleet; for proving their value; and for starting where he lives and works to improve one relatively small, but potentially globally significant, fossil-fuel sucking, climate-changing problem, the Ordinary Heroes award this week is kindly offered to Paul Gillespie.

Recycle your cell phones here ...

2009-04-15T06:10:00.000-07:00

Last week, in It's time to recycle your old cell phones, we discovered we could save enough energy every year to power 18,500 homes simply by recycling our 100 million old cell phones instead of discarding them.

Blogger/Tweeter beinggreener did us all a favor and found four companies who are making it very easy for us to do so. Please support beinggreener by visiting her post, Can you hear me now… recycling, and linking to these sites from there.

If you can't take that extra moment, or your computer is very slow, the four companies include AT&T, who provides free shipping labels for the Cell Phones for Soldiers program; Sprint, who offers a buy-back program and a $$ credit; T-Mobile, who uses recycled phone funds to support programs working with children; and Verizon Wireless, which gives re-purposed cell phones to organizations working to prevent domestic violence.

How do you imagine the people in the world of Ordinary communicate? I'm serious. I'd very much like your ideas and input. Extended discussion encouraged!

Is your garden on on the World Food Garden Map?

2009-04-14T06:45:00.000-07:00

All over the world, people are growing their own--food, that is.

If you're growing your own food, be it a full-scale garden, in a co-op or shared plot, or in a flower box under your window, the World Food Garden wants to put your garden on the map. You can zero in on gardens in your area to see who is growing food in your neck of the woods and what type. Each carrot on the map is a garden. A red carrot represents a personal garden, a yellow carrot a community garden. Gardeners sharing or selling seeds have gray carrots.

WorldFoodGarden.org was founded under the premise that many of the world's current issues- environmental, economic, and political, would be much alleviated if everyone in the world tended their own small garden.
World Food Garden

If you're not growing your own food yet, but think you might like to, the World Food Garden offers plenty of help to get you started. Gardeners are a chatty bunch and love to talk dirt.

At this time, the World Food Garden team is a team of one. Thank you, Eve Sibley, for providing this invaluable resource and connecting gardeners all over the globe. Growing and sharing our own food is perhaps the ultimate act of personal responsibility.

It doesn't get much more Ordinary than that.

I'm going to make that audience rock

2009-04-12T12:45:00.000-07:00

When Susan Boyle tells the fellows backstage at Britain's Got Talent that she's going to rock the audience, the eavesdropping crowd out front laughs. They're not laughing when she finishes her performance. Give a listen.

I'm going to make that audience rock!
Susan Boyle

Watch the full performance, including the touching before and after interviews (embedding was not permitted).

Despite their often condescending attitudes, I give gratitude to the producers and judges of the show for giving the world an opportunity to hear the voice of Susan Boyle, Paul Potts and others who have honed their talents quietly, with perhaps only secret hopes of one day performing in front of an audience.

In the world of Ordinary, every individual is valued for their unique abilities. One does not need to be nipped and tucked, pruned and peeled, toned and tanned, body-sculpted and blemish-covered to achieve success. All any one needs is to honor their gifts and, well, give them.

Most of us did not grow up with that kind of support and encouragement. It's up to us to trust our abilities, to find our true work (play), and to begin to share it with the world. It's never too late. No matter where you are in life, you have something of beauty to offer the rest of us. Who are you rocking?

My thanks and acknowledgement to AFelsinger, amyvernon and absolutelytrue for pointing me to this wonderfully inspiring and moving performance through their tweets and retweets.

Ordinary Hero: Barbara E.

2009-04-09T02:06:00.000-07:00

Image copyright L. Kathryn Grace, 2009
All rights reserved

"We have a new member who needs a ride to meetings. Can you take her?" That's how I met Barbara. I was shy, socially awkward and did not make friends quickly. She was educated, well-read, savvy, artistic, a tad eccentric. I was hooked. The first few months, we didn't talk much in the forty-five minute drive to and from our political action meetings. I, self-conscious, felt intimidated. Later, she wouldn't be able to shut me up.

In the meantime, she would volunteer to do the layout for the organization's newsletter, the editing of which was a safe task for me--very little public exposure or public speaking required. She was good at layout. She was good at anything leadership asked her to do. If you've ever worked with volunteers, you know we can be a sketchy bunch. Barbara was always on time, always reliable, and frequently did more than expected without being asked. She saw a need and filled it quietly. She was the volunteer every organizer dreams.

She was passionate about women's rights, human rights, environmental action, art--and she was humble. Unlike so many in the political realm, she never sought the spotlight. Invaluable to the organizations whose work she championed, she gave generously of her skills and experience, her energy and time, and especially her artistic wisdom.

When one after the other our marriages failed, we were there for each other, she more than I, truth be told. Though her life crumbled about her, she was steadfast in her loyalty, comforting me while I floundered in an emotional sea of self-doubt, raw pain and loss. Through her own suffering, she listened quietly to my rants and self-centered caterwauling for hours on end. She always gave me a hug and an "I love you" as we parted.

The last evening I spent with her, we chatted as old friends do through a sumptuous dinner at an indoor/outdoor cafe--new in our town, then sipped vinegary wine at a fundraiser for one of our favorite charities. We capped it with a spontaneous buggy ride through a delicious May evening. Yes, clip-clop, clip-clop. Cerulean blue sky burning golden and cherise, then fading to deep blue, spangled with stars. It was a gorgeous hour of shared contentment with a friend so beloved, words were superfluous in the cool night breeze. Do I remember correctly? Did the heady scent of cottonwoods in bloom fill the balmy air? Or was it a steamy August night, shirts sticking to our skin? Memory, supreme trickster.

How did I lose her? Did I become so self-absorbed I stopped calling her, stopped sending notes? Perhaps she reached a point where her own suffering was such that she could no longer stomach my bellyaching and kvetching when we got together.

A couple of times we made contact again but somehow let it slip, and a few years ago she found me through my family, each of us long since moved to far-flung states. We had out-of-town company the day she called, my birthday it was, and though I wrote down her telephone number and e-mail address, somehow the handy junk-mail envelope I used was lost by the time the company left and I settled down to call her back.

Every word she spoke was true.

Still, despite my incompetent friendship, I think of Barbara fondly and with gladness and gratitude. Every word she spoke was true. Of how many people can you say that? Now, searching the Internet, I find images of her with her grandchild, images of her daughter, easily recognizable after twenty-five years. Perhaps I can reach Barbara through her children and get permission to use her full name here, for she is one of the heroes of my life, and certainly an Ordinary Hero.

Whatever transpired in the thirty-some years since we met and the quarter century since we last saw one another, Barbara exemplifies the love, generosity, compassion and friendship that are typical of the villagers of Ordinary.

For being true to herself, to her friends, to her family, to her country and to people who may never know the love she devoted to their well-being and safety, and for the joy her friendship has been to me over the years, despite our separation, I offer to Barbara E. the Ordinary Heroes Award.

May all who read this know the joy of such a friendship.

Namaste, Barbara.

It's time to recycle your old cell phones

2009-04-08T07:15:00.000-07:00

Most of us have at least one lying about in a drawer or box of junk in the garage.

Take advantage of National Cell Phone Recycling Week, happening right now, to recycle yours safely and conveniently. Better yet, if yours is in good working order, donate it to a charity that refurbishes them and gives or sells them at low cost to the people who need them. The Environmental Protection Agency and its recycling partners make it super easy with tips and drop-off locations.

More than 100 million cell phones are no longer used annually. If we recycled all of them, we would save enough energy to power 18,500 U.S. homes for a year.
Environmental Protection Agency

Pass the word! E-mail this post to your friends and co-workers. Print a full-color flyer and post it on your office bulletin board, in the lunchroom, the laundry room, the cafeteria or a meeting room at your local library, school, church or synagogue. Educators, download The Life Cycle of a Cell Phone poster geared toward sixth to eighth graders. That's an Ordinary thing to do.

My thanks to Dave Levitan, without whose article, Recycle 100 million cell phones, power almost 20,000 homes, I might never have known about National Cell Phone Recycling Week and the reasons we need to be responsible for our castoff phones.

Image courtesy Environmental Protection Agency.

Ordinary Hero: Amy Krouse-Rosenthal

2009-04-02T06:05:00.000-07:00

Image copyright L. Kathryn Grace, 2009
All rights reserved

Amy Krouse-Rosenthal is a person who likes to make things.

That's the first line on the home page of her web site, Who is Amy, where you can link to articles that describe her as a best-selling children's book author and tell a delightful ongoing love story.

I've been married to Jason for over 17 years. Which means I've woken up beside him something like 46,225 times.
Redbook

She writes adult books, too, one of which is titled Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, but that's not the reason she is an Ordinary Hero. The reason Amy Krouse-Rosenthal is a recipient of the Ordinary Heroes Award is because she made the video, The Beckoning of Lovely. Watch and be glad.

Thank you, Amy. Your vision, love, artistry, passion and belief in your work and your self make the Village of Ordinary less a vision and ever more real today.

[Edit 4/3/09: Belated thanks and acknowledgement to Wanda of What Would Wanda Do? and to chookooloonks, who introduced the video to Wanda.]

Now that you've met your meat

2009-03-31T07:15:00.000-07:00

How did you feel about the video in yesterday's post, Can you eat meat? If you're like me, you may find it difficult to swallow meat and dairy products.

Though my eggs, poultry, bacon, beef and milk come primarily from range-fed, grass-fed, organic, humanely raised and (oxymoronically) slaughtered animals, the images of the video are so deeply imprinted on my mind that I suspect I will not be able to swallow animal flesh again.

It's tough, even in a city like San Francisco, to eat organic, free-range all the time, but it is possible. Yes, it costs extra. I manage the extra cost four ways:

As a tithe;
As an investment in the future well-being of the Earth and her creatures;
As the humane, right thing to do;
As the best possible support for the small-scale farmers and ranchers who dare to buck the system and grow food that is good for us, good for the planet and good for the animals on whose lives we depend.

After watching yesterday's video, I will continue to buy the highest rated organic and free-range dairy products I can, though I'll be far less likely to dine in restaurants unless the menu clearly states they serve only organic.

But what if I weren't already on this path? What if that video was the catalyst for an entire lifestyle change? Where would I start?

Wendy Gabriel of the Minneapolis Green Living Examiner posted the final installment of her interview with Dr. Alan Greene, author of Raising Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Caretoday. She asked Dr. Greene, "If you were only going to choose a few organic foods, what would you choose?"

Dr. Green named three: milk, potatoes, peanut butter. I would add eggs, yogurt, butter and cream as well--all dairy products. To learn why Dr. Greene put those three at the top of the list, visit Gabriel's article on Examiner.com.

What to do if your local grocery store or supermarket does not carry organic produce and dairy? Local Harvest makes it easy to find a farmer's market or a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm near you, any where in the United States. Chances are there's one close enough.

Many farmers market vendors are certified organic producers or in the process of certification. They won't mind if you ask to see their certification. They need your support as much as you need their fresh, tasty food.

CSAs deliver freshly harvested, in-season fruits and vegetables, either to your doorstep or to a central location within a relatively short radius, so look for one near you and begin getting premium foods picked ripe, packed quickly and delivered almost immediately.

In the Village of Ordinary, some people are vegetarians and some are carnivores. All are raised with a deep respect and abiding love for the animals with whom they share the Earth and especially with the animals who help to feed them. For more ways to build that dynamic into our lives, subscribe to this blog or sign up for e-mail notifications in the right hand column.

Can you eat meat after watching this video?

2009-03-30T07:15:00.000-07:00

I eat meat, eggs, milk products. Do you? If you are a fan of The Village of Ordinary and the gentle lifestyle it models, please watch The Transformation of Animals into Food.

Beware. The video includes near heart-stopping footage of the animals who supply the eggs we scramble with peppers, onion and cheese; the milk from which the cheese is made and that we feed our children and pour into our coffee; the plump chicken legs, spicy wings, wholesome heart-healthy skinless breasts, crispy bacon, juicy ribs, fast-food burgers, and well-marbled T-bones with which we nourish our bodies and tickle our taste buds. Yum. Or is it?

Can you stomach it? The need for Ordinary grows greater and more personal every day.

Did you turn out your lights?

2009-03-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

Last night, according to Earth Hour's 2009 Kids Page, more than a billion of us turned out our lights. That's about one-seventh of the world's 6.7 billion people. Were you among us?

Here in San Francisco, we enjoyed a late supper and a full hour of uninterrupted conversation in our cool, darkened rooms.

[Image from Earth Hour Kids home page]

Disappointingly, about the same number of windows in our neighborhood were dark as last year.

Mayor Gavin Newsom helped to dim the city's nightscape when he yanked the switches for the Bay Bridge and Coit Tower. Thank you, Mayor, for your support of Earth Hour 2009! I'll hold you to your Twitter DM today to help push SF Earth Hour viral on the web in 2010.

Cities and hamlets around the world dimmed their lights, from tiny Igiugig, Alaska, to Beijing. For an impressive show of lights going out, watch the Earth Hour 2009 slide show.

There's still time to turn this symbolic act into concrete action. Aside from votes, nothing sounds so sweet to a politician as a thank you. Take time to thank the pols in your city who supported Earth Hour and encourage them to make their town even darker for one hour next year. Public opinion matters, too, so take advantage of this opportunity to write to President Obama and tell him how important climate change is to you and your family.

Remember how the video in yesterday's post, Lights Out--Earth Hour 2009, began with a single voice saying, "I'm just one person," quickly multiplied by hundreds of voices all chanting "I'm just one person"?

Remember how big (and annoying) the sound of those voices became?

That's how climate change works: Each of us contributing carbon emissions through our quick trips to the grocery store, lights and heat on in rooms we're not using, extra gas use from low tires and poorly tuned engines.

So you're just one person. Instead of one person adding to carbon emissions, be one person reducing them. The World Wildlife Fund has eight quick actions you can pick from right now.

We can all make small changes, one person, one minute, one hour a time. That's exactly how we are building a world more like the Village of Ordinary.

Lights out--Earth Hour 2009!

2009-03-28T14:13:00.000-07:00

Tonight's the night! All over the world, at 8:30 pm, wherever they are, people are turning off their lights for 60 minutes.

Why? We're showing in the most dramatic way possible our support for protecting the Earth.

One person committed to reducing energy consumption can make a difference, but millions working together can change the world.
Earth Hour 2009

We're dimming the Earth's artificial lights for one hour around the globe. Watch as it happened last year and see how beautiful darkness can be:

Are your favorite celebs turning out their lights? Learn who has their finger on the switch at Earth Hour US. Watch the slide show of cities dimming their lights all over the world and find links to other participating countries. Got kids? Now's the time to find creative ways to show them how human beings managed without electricity, planes, cars and phones until the last century. Earth Hour Kids has some great ideas and loads of fun-filled facts.

Are you turning out your lights tonight? Tell us why in the comments below and Sign up and be counted! If you're reading this after the event in your locale, tell us what you observed between 8:30 and 9:30 pm; and if you turned out your lights, how did you feel for that one hour?

Earth Hour 2009 is one small way we can all help to build the Village of Ordinary tonight. The Earth Hour Tool Box offers many more. Join us, won't you?

Ordinary Hero: Helena Norberg-Hodge

2009-03-26T07:15:00.000-07:00

Image copyright L. Kathryn Grace, 2009
All rights reserved

In 1975, a young linguist, Helena Norberg-Hodge, traveled to the tiny Indian state of Ladakh, so far north, and so Buddhist in culture, it is known as Little Tibet. She has returned to Ladakh for six months every year since, living with her friends and teachers, learning their language and assuring it continues to live in both written and spoken form. What she has witnessed in nearly thirty-five years is the near destruction of a self-sustaining, peaceful culture where crime was almost unheard of and the people were so efficient in providing for themselves that they partied during most of the harshest winter months.

To what does Norberg-Hodge attribute this change after more than 500 years of contentment and plenty? Western encroachment. The following film, in three video segments, nicely contrasts the genteel, traditional lifestyle of the Ladakhi with the noise, crime and dirt that symbolize the new, progressive lifestyle imported, along with gasoline and monoculture crops, from the west.

You can learn more of the story in Norberg-Hodge's book, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, which is the inspiration for The Village of Ordinary. Ancient Futures shows us that Ordinary is not merely a vision, but a reality in one of the harshest climes in the world.

Founder of the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC), Norberg-Hodge spends much of her time away from Ladakh promoting ecological, economic and political strategies to save the earth. That last phrase, Strategies to Save the Earth, is also the name of a short videotaped conversation with Doug Tomkins, founder of NorthFace and Esprit. In the film, Norberg-Hodge says:

For about 35 years I've been trying to raise awareness about the way in which the economy--economic development, globalization--lies behind almost all the social and environmental crises we face. ... A lot of issues converge in the same root causes. ... It would be a lot better if we could focus on the need for change and look upon the key levers that could bring the economy in a direction that would support life, support our water systems, the land, and help to rebuild the fabric of society.

That means looking at the way in which deregulating global trade and finance is responsible for most of the social and ecological destruction we see. So we need to be looking at re-regulating finance and trade, and one of the things we can do is start already at the local level to create protected local markets where producers and consumers collaborate to create a new economy that really supports diversity.

Sound familiar? But Norberg-Hodge is hopeful for a better future:

The most important idea is to realize is that we're dealing with a man-made economic system. It's not evolutionary. It's not happening at its own natural progression, that things just get bigger and bigger. In Nature, everything that waxes, also wanes. We're not talking about evolution. We're not talking about something natural. It's very unnatural, made by people, and we can change it. We just need to have the courage to look at the bigger picture, and the courage to realize that we are capable of changing a man-made system.

For her love of the Ladakhi people and their culture,
For her ability to recognize the economic and social genius of the Ladakhi,
For her resolve to work with her Ladakhi friends to preserve their way of life,
For her efforts to bring westerners to Ladakh to work and learn,
For her active promotion and training in shortening the distance from farm to fork through her Local Food Toolkit,
For continuing to speak, write, publish and travel to encourage all of us to make more sustainable, life-enhancing choices,
For her faith in humanity to do the right thing, eventually,
For her perseverance and refusal to give up despite the setbacks life throws at her,
For making the story of the Ladakhi available to us all,

the Ordinary Heroes award is offered with deepest gratitude to Helena Norberg-Hodge.

[Edited for typographical errors on 3/28/09]

Thirsty? Watch this

2009-03-24T05:10:00.000-07:00

This is World Water Week. Dozens of folks have called water the next oil. Some say we'll be paying as much for water in a few years as we paid for oil last fall. What's going on with water, and why is it important to the vision of Ordinary?

Grab yourself a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Turn off the phones. Get comfortable, and spend perhaps the most important educational hour and sixteen minutes you've ever spent with this video. (You won't want to stop. It's that good.)

Did you watch it? What do you think? Will you change the way you use water? Will you discuss water with your friends? Your congressional representatives? How do we make conscious water choices Ordinary?

Ordinary Heroes: Amelia and Michael Howard of Eden Place

2009-03-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

Image copyright L. Kathryn Grace, 2009
All rights reserved

They had the money to live almost anywhere. They chose to return and raise their children in the Southside Chicago neighborhood in which Amelia Howard grew up, a place now riffed with gang violence and fear. She became a teacher in a local school. He started a construction business. Together, they cleared a neighborhood vacant lot that had become a toxic waste dumping ground. It took them five years. In its place, they grew a (mostly) native plant garden, built a wetland and a prairie, and taught parents and their children how to grow their own food. They called it Eden Place.

Now city kids who know little or nothing of prairies, flowers and fruit trees can run barefoot through thick, mown grass, pick tomatoes from the vine, watch beans climb poles through the summer heat, and learn about the native plants that grew in Chicago long before buildings and concrete covered the landscape. Chicago Wilderness Magazine tells the story in Secret Garden, and you can learn more about the project at Eden Place Nature Center: An Urban Oasis. What you won't find on the latter page is any information about the Howards and their role in rescuing the land, how they dealt with fire-bombing gangs who tried to stop them, or their struggle to keep the center going. They don't appear to be the horn-tooting type, unless the horn is to draw attention to the need for more volunteers and cash to keep the center and its programs running.

With an eye on the present, the center actively promotes getting down and dirty in the garden. Children of all ages and their parents and teachers participate in nature classes and hands-on gardening, including picking and eating fruits and vegetables as they ripen. The center's eye is firmly fixed on the future as well. In addition to environmental and gardening classes for students of all ages, the center provides unpaid Environmental Management/Stewardship internships to undergraduate and graduate students.

This garden has helped families heal. It's helped them learn how to be healthy physically and socially. It's improved our quality of life.

Michael Howard as quoted on
Gardener's Supply Company's
2005 Garden Crusader Awards

For their courage, determination and perseverance to turn an illegal toxic waste dumping ground into a body, mind and soul-nourishing haven, this third Ordinary Heroes award is humbly offered to Amelia and Michael Howard, with gratitude. May they be blessed one-thousand fold.

My thanks to Twitterer @urbangarden for pointing me to this story.

Ordinary heroes: Willie Smits rebuilds a rain forest

2009-03-12T07:21:00.000-07:00

Willie Smits started out trying to save a couple of orangutans. In the process he sheltered thousands, halted rampaging grassland fires, regrew a rain forest, changed the climate and, oh yes, provided water, food, livelihood, education and a vastly improved standard of living for thousands of Borneo natives. In his TED talk titled A 20-year tale of hope: How we re-grew a rainforest, Smits tells the story in just eighteen minutes. His speech left me breathless. Take a look.

Whew! I have dozens of questions for Smits, don't you? While he is not the first to reclaim a forest or jungle or green a desert, Smits's work shows us how close we can be to realizing the vision of Ordinary.

For devoting his life to protecting and preserving orangutans and their habitat; for showing us how it can be done while improving the environment; for upgrading the economy and helping people, who like the orangutans get their livelihood from the forest, to achieve a higher standard of living; and for making the vision of a world of peace, harmony and prosperity, much like Ordinary, real; this week's Ordinary Hero is Willie Smits.

Pinning our hopes on youth

2009-03-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

They're plugged in, tuned in and turned on to making change. In Washington, D.C., last Tuesday, two thousand mostly young people from all over the country rallied and marched in a Capitol Climate Action to shut down the toxin-spreading coal plant that lights and heats Congress. They're off and running in the next weeks and months to coal-fired electrical facilities all across the country, and they're Twittering about their experiences during the events so the rest of us can follow them live. Their rallying cry: This is what democracy looks like!

That's not all.

On Thursday, Minnesota youth took their concern for clean air, clean cars and clean jobs to their state capitol, where they heard Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy:

We don't need your leadership in the future. If we had waited for your leadership these past two years, we wouldn't have the presidential campaign we just had. We wouldn't have green jobs as a main slogan, now, reorganizing the whole economy. We wouldn't have the level of hope that we've got. We don't need your leadership in the future. We need your leadership right now.

Take a look at what the kids had to say for themselves, and how they responded to Jones.

Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy,and NASA scientist Dr. Tom Hansen are two names we recognize because they've been warning us of the perils of global warming for decades. Thousands of others, most without any recognition whatsoever, have worked for an equal time to change laws and improve environmental conditions in their communities, states and globally. Every one of these individuals contribute to the vision of the world of Ordinary, and I give gratitude for them, for their selflessness and for their actions, great and small.

Backed by years of research, debate, political action and civil action, our youth have the collective power to compel at last the change that offers hope for one day realizing Ordinary. May they use it well and wisely.

Ordinary Hero: Jarvenpa

2009-03-05T07:15:00.000-08:00

For courage to write the truth as she lives it
For unfailing compassion
For anger in the face of injustice
For love of all beings, great and small
For unstinting generosity to those society rejects
For willingness to sit with another in pain
For persistence in working to right wrong
For resilience
For keeping her heart open when it would be so much easier to close

And for making her piece of the world better, one day at a time, in the most Ordinary of ways,

The first Ordinary Heroes award is extended to Jarvenpa, whose blog Outside the Windows is vibrant, passionate, full of nit and grit, and revealing of a heart so broken, so healed, so big with love that anyone looking in can only be healed in turn. If that weren't enough, Windows is a damn good read.

I discovered Jarvenpa through another blogger's link several years ago. Yes, she writes beautifully, which makes it easy to see her world and almost to believe I feel what she is feeling. But it is her consistency in eating grief again and again--and recovering, in seeing beauty at every turn when she could see ruin, and in helping those who can least help themselves, though they keep on trying--the wounded, scarred people who show up on her doorstep with addictions, mental illnesses, hearts broken beyond coping in a material world--that inspires and motivates me. Her stories are pure life as she experiences it in her Northern California bookstore and garden, on the streets of her town--visceral, real, immediate, heart-jolting.

Give a shout to Jarvenpa, then sit down with a nice hot cup and get to know a woman whose life makes the vision of the Village of Ordinary seem closer and closer today.

The Ordinary Heroes Award

2009-03-04T07:15:00.000-08:00

All over the world, people work within their homes, businesses, communities and governments to ease suffering, build harmonious relationships, guide our leaders and compel our corporations to make conscious, socially responsible decisions. They work to heal and protect the earth that future generations might know the beauty and wonder so many of us older generation remember from our youth.

Whether their work is to save a single child from an abusive family member, to teach families how to grow an organic vegetable and flower garden, or to regrow a rain forest, such individuals are heroes. They hold the vision of a just, whole world. They are Ordinary Heroes.

Wanda Tucker celebrates Love Thursdays on her blog What Would Wanda Do? In a bow to Wanda and to love, beginning tomorrow Realizing Ordinary will celebrate and honor a new Ordinary Hero each Thursday.

If you have received the Ordinary Hero award, you may post it, unaltered, on your blog or web site, with a link back to this page explaining its origins.

Recipients may also pass the award along to individuals who have shown through their actions a desire to heal the earth, to reclaim the food that nourishes our bodies, to ease suffering, to improve communications between rival individuals, factions or governments. Again, the badge is not to be altered for any reason and should include a link back to this page.

In case you're wondering, the stylized image in the badge is of my personal hero, who wishes to remain anonymous, and her grandchild. This is one way I honor her and the work she has done for children and their families throughout her adult life.

At last--Alice Walker has a web site--and a blog

2009-03-01T07:15:00.000-08:00

It gives me enormous pleasure to discover today Alice Walker's web site and blog. She is now sharing her thoughts, wanderings, experiences and wisdom with the world, free to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. I am lost for hours, gorging on a feast of perfect words, organic, succulent and ripe.

But it is not the words that fill me. They are only ingredients, however fresh, savory or sweet. It is the measure of the words, born of a lifetime of truth telling, that feeds my soul.

Simply to read her most recent blog post, A Letter from Alice Walker to Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Prize winner under house arrest in Burma (Myanmar) since 1989, is to travel from Aung San Suu Kyi's well-guarded prison home to the inauguration of President Barack Obama, to the killing in California of a 19-year-old man by BART police who shot him while he lay face down with his hands behind his back.

On the journey, we absorb the sights, smell the exotic scents of any traveler, but what we learn and feel and understand is so much more. You must read it. Please go there now.

As extraordinary as she is, Alice Walker is one of my Ordinary heroes.

Ordinary love and Proposition 8

2008-12-27T04:28:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed that Rose, the journalist telling the story of the Village of Ordinary, lives and loves with her lifelong partner, Cheyenne.

Ordinary is an inclusive community. Because children are born to families who want them; because as the title of the book says, the people understand "It Takes a Village to raise a child; and because people are raised to fulfill their individual potential in a comforting setting of community and love; prejudice, fear and hatred simply do not exist. (For precedence, see Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh.)

Yet hate, fear and prejudice continue, sometimes for the color of our skin, sometimes for the faith we practice, sometimes for the people we love and who love us. So it is with astonished gratitude that I watched this video of a mainstream newscaster, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, giving a bold, impassioned plea to the people of California who voted away, last month, the rights of gays and lesbians, under their constitution, to marry the loves of their lives.

Listen to Mr. Olbermann's comments regarding California's Proposition 8 and tell me what you think.

Now that is someone helping to make the vision of Ordinary real. Thank you, Mr. Olbermann.

USDA trying to shut down family-owned organic milk farms?

2008-12-14T16:24:00.000-08:00

Do you eat organic? If you do, very likely you've made a conscious choice to pay a little more for foods stamped "USDA Organic."

Congress has charged the US Department of Agriculture with assuring we get what we pay for when we see this seal. You may know that they don't always.

The last eight years have seen USDA interpretations that many feel belie the term organic. Get the lowdown on that, and keep informed on all things organic, through the Organic Consumers Association (OCA).

For now, there's a really important USDA proposed rule that could do a whole lot more harm than good where organic milk is concerned. This rule is about to go into effect unless enough of us convince the Feds to give us a little more time to read it and respond. Here's the skinny.

What: USDA proposed rule supposed to "clamp down on giant factory dairy farms ... that violate the spirit and letter of federal organic law by primarily confining their cattle to feedlots," according to organics watchdog The Cornucopia Institute.

Issue: The proposed rule might clamp down on giant factory farms, depending on how allowed exceptions are interpreted, but it is likely it will also close most family-owned operations as well, according to Cornucopia. Additionally, the USDA gave all of us only sixty days to read, review and comment on the proposed rule before making it final. Day sixty is December 23, just nine days from today.

Action Step: Buy us all more time to read and understand this 26-page document of fine-print government doublespeak--Sign the petition requesting 30 days additional review time.

Believe me, we need it. I tried to read the document this evening and got only so far as page seven before my eyes crossed. I'm still not sure what I was reading. On first glance, it seems the government is doing what it says it intends: closing loopholes so mega-farms can't call milk organic that comes from conventional cattle hackle-deep in their own muck and filth in feedlots. Where's the pasture? (Don't be fooled by the bucolic rolling hills on the milk carton.)

On second glance, try to wrap your eyes and brain around all the clauses, references to exceptions in section this and paragraph that of non-linked external documents, and you begin to think you need an attorney to tell you what they really mean by it all.

The OCA and Cornucopia think we all need time to look this thing over. Do a very Ordinary thing just now: read the petition and if you think it has merit, sign it.

Playing for change

2008-12-09T07:45:00.000-08:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post to bring you this treat from Playing for Change: Peace through Music.

Music is a dominant feature in the Village of Ordinary, as important as food and friendship. Mark Johnson, Jonathon Walls and the people of Playing for Change believe music can help the people of the world make peace. They circle the globe, videotaping ordinary street musicians playing the same song, just as you see in the vid above.

That isn't all they do. Go to their website and learn more. Be amazed.

Everywhere I turn, people are building Ordinary, one idea, one video, one committed step at a time. Who do you know who is building a piece of Ordinary? Share the vision. Tell us about it.

Why are there no corporations in Ordinary?

2008-12-06T08:00:00.000-08:00

Did you watch Annie Leonard's vid, The Story of Stuff? If you did, you understand why there are no corporations in the land of Ordinary.

Because the people of Ordinary and her world support themselves and each other fully on the land ...

Because they use only what they need and never more than the land can provide ...

Because each individual is encouraged to find and develop her/his unique talents and abilities and to share those with society ...

Because every individual contributes to the day-to-day upkeep of common buildings and spaces and to growing and gathering food ...

And because the people are indeed their brother's and sister's keepers ...

There is no place for greedy corporations in the land of Ordinary.

Oh, I know what you're thinking. Humankind has yet to evolve to live peacefully without coveting power, things and above-all currency. Yes? No. Remember the Ladakh! In my lifetime, before westerners so corrupted the Ladakhi society, her people lived just so. We humans can do it again.

On Sunday in Should you pay a little more for hormone-free milk?, I showed you a chapter from the three-hour documentary, The Corporation. Think of Leonard's vid as the outline and The Corporation as the full story.

For a motivating shot, watch the movie trailer right now.

I hope it will impel you to take time to watch the entire film. When you realize how deeply the multinational corporations manipulate us, despite our best efforts to resist, you may feel anger as I did, perhaps rage, but also an overwhelming sadness. As the film so poignantly shows again and again, the CEOs themselves do not want to live in the over-crowded, polluted, unhealthy world they are creating in their pursuit of short-term, rapid-gain profits.

On the other hand, there's the Wall Street guy who could think of only one thing on 9-11: "What is this doing to the price of gold?" He saw the tragedy and disaster of 9-11 as an opportunity to make money--a lot of money. Indeed, if news reports were correct, Osama Bin Laden himself planned to make a killing on Wall Street when United Airlines stock plummeted following the strikes.

Watch the film free in 23 segments on YouTube or purchase it from the www.thecorporation.com or rent it on NetFlix iTunes.

I give gratitude for author Joel Bakan, who wrote the book of the same name, filmakers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott and all the people who shared their vision, talent, time, skill and energy in bringing these messages to us. They show us where we went wrong, at least in part. We can change. On the way to building Ordinary, we've much to do.

Watch and be amazed: The Story of Stuff

2008-12-01T23:08:00.000-08:00

In a comment on What if we stopped pouring our cash into the giant pool of money, blogger Carrie Wilson Link reminds us of the Story of Stuff video.

Here's a teaser. After you watch it, follow the link above to view the whole thing. It's twenty minutes and well worth your time.

In ecovillages like Ordinary, conspicuous, frequent consumption is extraordinary. Stewards of the land, villagers tend it carefully. They understand Nature's cycles and consider themselves a part of Nature and her patterns.

This is nothing new. Humankind lived in harmony with Nature for millenia. The question is: How do we return to a less extractive, less consumptive, more healing lifestyle? What would we have to give up? What would we gain? Imagine a world without malls, without endless ribbons of freeway traffic. Imagine a world so quiet you can hear crickets and peepers at night, so dark the stars pop from the velvet sky almost into your hand.

Imagine a world with no mega corporations, no corporate greed, a world where individuals' natural tendency to compassion for one another and care of the earth who feeds us is second nature. Imagine a world like Ordinary. Can you?

Should you pay a little more for hormone-free milk?

2008-11-30T21:49:00.000-08:00

In Ordinary, villagers eat dairy products from cows, goats, chickens and other poultry, which they carefully raise and tend. Villagers use skills passed through thousands of years of animal husbandry to assure a safe milk, egg and meat supply.

When it comes to protecting the food supply in our world, though, corporate expediency and profits may cloud executive vision a hair. Should we be concerned? Take a look at this segment of the film The Corporation and decide for yourself.

Producers Jane Akre and Steve Wilson thought Americans should know the truth about the hormones, called rBST, that dairy farmers feed cows to increase milk production. They say they had evidence that the hormone manufacturers suppressed, but Fox News wouldn't let them tell their story. Once again, corporate expediency and profit, this time in the form of mega advertising dollars, appear to have temporarily blinded executives.

Short take: The hormones cause terrible suffering in dairy cows, including udder and teat infections that secrete bacteria-filled pus. Milking machines can't tell the difference between clean milk and pus-infected milk. Sure, our milk is pasteurized, but bacteria levels following pasteurization are higher in milk from hormone-fed cows. We drink that milk. Our children drink it. While Europe and much of the western world has banned the use of hormones in beef and dairy cattle for years, our own US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves their use.

Are Americans at risk? Harvard researcher Ganmaa Davaasambuu thinks chances are good that we are. The Sprecher Institute for Comparative Cancer Research at Cornell University, on the other hand, says little or no evidence has been found to support the hypothesis. Of course, that's partly because almost no one has studied the issue. What we don't know can't hurt us. Can it?

Whatever science decides, our household will continue to pay a little more for hormone-free milk. We consider the extra pennies it takes to protect dairy animals from unwarranted suffering a worthy tithe. Who knows? We just might save ourselves a nasty bout with cancer in our later years.

What do you think?

What if we stopped pouring our cash into the giant pool of money?

2008-10-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

What if we stopped buying all that stuff? Do we really need it? Does it improve our quality of lives so very much? Take a journey with me for just a moment.

Imagine that you are ninety-five years old. You're sitting at your dining room table, having a cup of tea and a biscuit. What matters to you right now? Look around you. What's in this room with you? Who is in this room with you?

Are you surrounded by beautiful things? Do you enjoy dusting them? Do you enjoy looking at them, touching them, feeling them? How did you acquire them? How costly were they? What did you give up to get them?

Are you surrounded by people you love who love you? Are they speaking to you as if you are intelligent and have something to contribute? Your body isn't what it used to be: Are the people with you conscious of your needs and loving in assuring they're met?

Can you see trees, perhaps a mountain or the ocean from your window? Can you see a river or a lake or pond? Is there a nourishing garden for body and soul nearby? Do you still love the scent of a tomato picked from the vine?

When you look back on your life, what do you remember that gladdens your heart? What do you tell your great-grandchildren, perhaps your great-great-grandchildren, you are glad you did? How many of those moments are big ones and how many are what many might consider small?

What do you wish you had done with your time and your money twenty years ago, when you were seventy-five? Forty years ago at fifty-five? What choices do you wish you had made when you were younger? How much time do you wish you had spent at Target, WalMart, and the mall? How much money you spent in those places do you wish you had spent differently? How do you wish you had used those dollars?

Ask everyone in the room to leave. Turn and speak to your younger self, the self sitting in the chair reading this right now. Tell yourself what you wish you done differently with your life, the daily choices you wish you had made, the things you wish you had done with your money.

Start doing them right now.

Then come back here and tell me what you saw, what you felt, what you want to change about the way you use money.

Consumers have all the power--What if we started to use it consciously?

2008-10-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

In The Giant Pool of Money, we begin to understand just how much money is available in the world. Did you notice how powerful we, as consumers, are? The world economy depends on us. It depends on us to buy things. It especially depends on us to buy things on credit.

First, we buy things that are worth less than we pay for them, so the folks who make them can turn a profit. That's not so bad, right? We all want a little extra cash in our pockets. Profit is good. So we've been taught.

The big deal, though, is that when we use our credit cards to buy stuff--be it computers and high-def, wide-screen TVs or socks and school supplies--we pay interest. Say in August you plunked down six hundred Visa dollars for clothes and calculators to outfit the kids. Did you calculate the interest you'll pay for those purchases? How much did each of the items cost once you add the cost of the credit to their purchase price? Maybe you made it up by carefully shopping for bargains. Or maybe because you found the bargains, you were able to buy an extra pair of jeans or the trendy backpack your son wanted.

Whatever the case, your purchases contributed outright to the giant pool of money. The interest you pay on your credit cards will continue to contribute to that giant pool. Oh, and since shopping is exhausting, did you stop at the food court while you were at the mall and buy snacks and drinks for the girls and their friends? Don't get me wrong. I understand low blood sugar and shopping don't mix. So do the fat cats. That's why there's so much high fructose corn syrup in the drinks you bought, and very likely in a good portion of the food as well. Those guys know that a sugar rush and the resulting crash can lead to impulse buys.

That gleam in their eye, if we could see into their board rooms and private clubs, is in the shape of dollar signs. They're counting on us to spend, spend, spend and charge, charge, charge. They're counting on us to keep filling their giant pool of money, drip by drip, dollar by dollar.

What if we didn't?

The giant pool of money--think there's not enough for you and me and everyone else?

2008-10-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

In this time of global economic melt-down, think about this: Take all the dollars spent everywhere in the world in one year. That's every dollar spent on the planet by every city, county, state, country, war machine, church, mega-corporation, small business, family, and yes, homeless drug addict. All those dollars, every dollar spent everywhere on the planet every single year do not begin to add up to the number high-roller investors the world over pump into sure-thing cash cows.

What the world's rich guys have left over to invest, after they buy their yachts, their fancy homes in three countries, their fast cars and luxury sedans, their five-thousand dollar suits and their $10,000-a-night resort hotel rooms amounts to seventy trillion dollars.

Think the 700 billion dollar bailout is scary? That's almost three-quarters of one trillion dollars.

The fat cats have seventy trillion dollars to play with. Remember, that's more than all of us--every person, organization, corporation, government body on the planet--spend every year, from bread to bombs.

They call this investment cash the giant pool of money.

So where did they get this giant pool of money? According to reporters on a recent This American Life episode titled The Giant Pool of Money, a lot of it came from you and me. When we bought gas for our cars, televisions made in China, clothing made in Indonesia, furniture made in Sri Lanka, pizza, McBurgers and the Colonel's chicken buckets, we threw our dollars, hand over fist, into the giant pool of money.

It's not all bad. While we filled the deep, deep pool in which the fat cats play, we also enriched offshore companies, often third-world countries. We were, quite literally, sharing our wealth and giving a hand up to people in countries who want all the glittery, glossy houses, cars, entertainment centers, I-pods and I-phones we have.

Because we are willing to pay, always, more than an object is worth, thus making a profit for the seller, we feed the wealth of those who figure out what we'll buy and get it to us while we're still eager to grab it.

So if you're thinking, during this time of economic crisis, while you watch your IRA and 401K plans melt away, while politicians tell you there's no way there will be Medicare or Social Security for the Boomers like they provided for their parents and grandparents, while you pay more and more for gasoline, car insurance, health insurance (if you're lucky enough to have it), and yes, milk, bread and shoes for the baby--if you're thinking there simply isn't enough to go around, think again.

The world has plenty of wealth. There is enough for everyone. Our task, should we choose to accept it, is to learn how to share. Greed has no place in Ordinary.

My thanks to blogger Hayden of Lyric Flight, whose comment on Talking up the green economy, suggested this topic.

Take a stand

2008-10-11T06:32:00.000-07:00

Stand on the street corner with a sign that says WAR
Stand on the corner with a sign that says PEACE
Take a stand

Wear a pin on your lapel that says WAR
Wear a pin that says PEACE
Show your heart's desire

When your colleague stabs you in the back, raise your fist and say
This is war!
Hold out your hand, look her in the eye and say, Peace
Act like you mean it

When a driver zooms into the parking spot you've been waiting for
Hold up an ugly sign in red and black and orange that says, WAR
Hold up a happy sign in cheerful blues and teals and yellows that says Peace
Feel the difference

When your child lies down on the playground kicking and screaming that she doesn't want to go and you're worn to a frazzle
Raise your fist to the heavens and say, War!
Sit down and scoop your child into your arms and rock her until she feels peace
Be the world you want your child to know when she grows up

Sit down after work with a beer and the remote and watch three hours of war, violence and murder-as-entertainment
Read a book to your child, take a walk in the cool evening air, share a candlelight dinner with your sweetheart, get out your art supplies and doodle, trim the dead leaves from your plants, paint the bathroom, write three thank you notes, call your best friend, knit a sweater, drink a hot cup of cocoa, go to bed early
Make peace

Talking up green jobs

2008-10-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

With the stock market tanking and bank after bank failing, lots of people are peeing-their-pants scared right now. The haves are trying to figure out how to get richer with the bailout and, failing that, how to recover their losses. The have-nots are trying to figure out how to pay the rent and the heating bills this winter, keep the lights on and the kids in shoes that fit.

Most of us between are wondering how to protect ourselves. If the haves have stolen our retirement funds, and if it's true there aren't enough workers to provide social security for the baby boomers, now that the government has borrowed against our SS funds for the next three hundred years or so, will we spend our declining years begging for handouts on the streets?

How bad will it get before it gets better? More importantly, what can possibly make it better?

Part of the answer lies in green collar jobs.

Green for All sorts the talking points for green collar jobs this way.

Green collar jobs rebuild a strong middle class
Green collar jobs provide pathways out of poverty
Green collar jobs require some new skills (and some new thinking about old skills
Green collar jobs tend to be local jobs
Green collar jobs save Planet Earth

Now that's an Ordinary solution. For more depth on each of these points, go to Green for All now.

What did you do on Green Jobs Now Awareness Day?

2008-09-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

All over the US last Saturday, everyday folks hosted and participated in hundreds of Green Jobs Now events.

Image courtesy Green Jobs Now

Events ranged from Guy Marsden's in Woolich, ME, where he showed two people how to make thermal window inserts; to the Green Jobs for All rally in Minneapolis, where more than one hundred job-hungry people showed up to take action and talk with elected officials; to a forum in New Orleans, where congressional candidates were grilled on their commitment to green jobs and environmental recovery.

As of this writing, organizers of 250 of the nearly 700 events have reported on their success.

"Together we proved that America's #1 resource is people, not oil," says Green Jobs Now.

You can be part of the green jobs revolution. Begin by signing the Green Jobs Now petition (text below) and learn about next action steps.

Were you part of a Green Jobs Now event Saturday? Tell us all about it in a comment below.

I'm ready for the green economy--Are you?

2008-09-27T05:54:00.001-07:00

Today is Green Jobs Now day. All over the country, people are showing up at city halls and on public streets to show their civic and national leaders they're ready to roll up their sleeves and go to work building a safer, greener economy.

Americans are ready to build the new economy. It's time to invest in saving the planet and the people. It's time for green jobs now!

Van Jones and the Green Jobs Now Team

Van Jones and his Green Jobs Revolution team say that millions of people are skilled and available to help:

Weatherize thousands of buildings
Install millions of solar panels on public and private buildings
Develop local and sustainable food options in their own communities
Engineer and wire public transit systems and smart electricity grids

There's so much more. Join the Green Jobs Revolution. Find an action near you today and do your part.

Winning and losing an election--An uncharacteristic rant

2008-09-27T05:35:00.000-07:00

Did you watch the presidential debate last night? Were you as disappointed as I was? McCain was well-rehearsed and well-prepared with his few soundbite talking points, hammering them home again and again. Ya gotta hand it to the republicans. They know how to use TV.

Obama, apparently winging it, and with no apparent understanding that viewers read body language and facial expressions, let show how much McCain got under his skin. Was he expecting a rational, substantive debate? The dems need serious schooling in TV 101, and I don't understand why, after all these years, they still don't get it.

And what's with all the "I think ..., uh, er," and "I believe, uh, er"? Viewers are trained to be impatient. Every word that doesn't count, every er and uh, uh, uh diverts viewer interest, especially the viewers Obama most needs to capture--so-called independents and undecideds. Worse, they make Obama appear uncertain, indecisive and weak.

The dems need some quick lessons in on-camera presentation if they're to save any chance of taking an election that was theirs to lose from the get-go. It's one thing the Clintons knew, understood and used well. Obama and Biden should be analyzing Reagan, Clinton, and yes, McCain videos and learn how to use TV to win an election.

That's the getting and keeping our attention rant. What about substance? Neither man showed a hint of leadership regarding last week's long-coming Wall Street meltdown and the astonishing bailout plan. Neither so much as mentioned the global crisis that threatens human life on the planet. If it weren't so frustrating, if the stakes weren't so high, the debate would have been a yawn.

The women of PeaceXPeace

2008-09-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

My heart is ever gladdened by the stamina and courage of women. If you need inspiration or just a lift today, take a look at the women of PeaceXPeace.

You might start with 79-year-old Bettye Johnson, who published her first (award-winning) book at 72. With Secrets of the Magdalene Scrolls, she goes further than The Da Vinci Code and histories of the Knights Templar, weaving an intriguing and fascinating tale of the life of the Magdalene and her family. Her sequel, Mary Magdalene, Her Legacy, is equally compelling.

Then there's Gaza Strip photojournalist Eman Mohammed. Documenting war, Mohammed goes where women of her country and faith are not supposed to go. Her camera tells the stories she cannot speak.

And there's midwife Robin Lim. Upon learning that post-childbirth hemorrhage was the leading cause of death in Bali, Lim founded Yayasan Bumi Sehat, a pre-natal and birthing clinic. Her lifesaving clinics (there are now two, with two more planned) are needed more than ever: Indonesia recently halted its national health insurance program.

At PeaceXPeace, stories abound from around the globe--of women helping women, building their communities, building businesses while protecting their natural environment and yes, making peace. What's more, they encourage each and every one of us to add our own story.

Be inspired. You can start with nothing and make something extraordinary. In women's lives, making something useful from nothing is more ordinary than not.

What if they closed prisons to open child care centers and schools?

2008-09-25T07:00:00.001-07:00

To illustrate its opposition to California Proposition 6, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland runs this image, which made me wonder ...

What if they closed prisons and used the money to open child care centers and schools? What if teachers and day care workers were paid as much as prison guards?

What the heck is National Food Desert Awareness Month about?

2008-09-24T07:00:00.002-07:00

There are no grocery stores in the food desert. When you're driving or walking past fast-food walk-up after fast-food drive-in hawking greasy burgers, chicken, fries and high fructose corn syrup (hfcs) colas, and there's not a grocery store or produce bin in sight, you know you're in a food desert. People who live in food deserts tend to die younger, and they die of diet-related illnesses such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease, according to researcher Mari Gallagher.

In Brother, can you spare an apple?, Gallagher says "If an apple is further away than a burger, then the chances of choosing fresh food more often than fast food is a mirage,"

Image courtesy freefoto.com; Photographer: Ian Britton

So in the interest of getting more healthy produce, particularly organically grown produce, into the hands and mouths of people at high risk for developing diet-related diseases, Gallagher, Growing Home, Inc., Goodness Greeness and the National Center for Public Research kicked off National Food Desert Awareness Month in Chicago earlier this month.

Why the Chicago launchpad? Because half a million people on Chicago's south side live in a food desert, and they're hungry for things that crunch.

Perhaps in all the rhetoric about cutting our taxes, bailing out Wall Street, and keeping America secure during this election season, the candidates should add "and a grocery store in every neighborhood." Or, dreaming wildly here, "and a pesticide-free garden in every neighborhood!"

Wouldn't that be Ordinary?

Growing home with green jobs

2008-09-23T07:00:00.001-07:00

For sixteen years, Chicago's Growing Home has been teaching homeless people to grow their own pesticide-free food. People living on the fringe grow new lives for themselves while working with the soil. They gain self-confidence and hope while they nurture tender seedlings into mature, fruit-bearing plants. Their health improves when they eat the wholesome foods they've grown, and they gain life and job skills when they sell their premium organic produce to high-end restaurants and at Chicago's premier farmer's market.

Recently, the program set up a local farmer's market on Chicago's south side, making delicious locally-grown produce available to people, many of whom are themselves one minimum-wage paycheck from homelessness, who live in the food desert.

We need a green economy that honors the earth ... but not a green economy only for the eco-chic. ... The people who are struggling for bus fare--they have a place too.

Van Jones, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

Growing Home is part of the Green Jobs Revolution. Learn more about it from the people whose lives are changing because of it:

The good stuff that you put into the earth, you get right back out the earth in a better way.
Participant, Growing Home, Inc.

How perfectly Ordinary is that? What are you growing in your garden today?

Can green jobs help save the economy as well as the planet?

2008-09-22T07:00:00.003-07:00

Next Saturday is
Green Jobs Now
National Day of Action

More than 800,000 workers lost their jobs in the last four months, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary. More than half of those, 417,000 breadwinners, lost their jobs just last month.

Both presidential candidates support green jobs as a way to stimulate the economy, help workers and solve some of our energy problems. Green Jobs Now and the organizations that support it aren't waiting until January 20 for those jobs to appear. They're taking action now.

So can you. Watch this video, then jump to Green Jobs Now and check out what's happening in your neck of the woods. Better still, sign up to host an event or take an action yourself. The key is to let our civic and national leaders know we're all looking for green jobs now.

How exciting is it, to know that so many ordinary people, in so many ordinary places, are looking for jobs that give back more than a paycheck--jobs that help us all build a more Ordinary kind of future?

I'd love to hear what you're doing to promote green jobs this week. If you can do nothing else, share this post with people you know.

What America needs is more losers

2008-09-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

Maybe what America needs is more losers. Al Gore told the story of global climate change in a way that everyone gets. Gore has been researching and talking about the environment since his college days. It was always his driving issue. Free from the tyranny of political aspirations, Gore focused on his core passions and, Phoenix-like, rose from what some saw as annihilation to a Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar, and a position of leadership that far surpasses the wimpy Washington puppet show.

Now John Edwards is gaining ground focusing on his personal passion: putting an end to poverty. What's more, he says we can be halfway there in ten years. That's right. Edwards has a plan for reducing poverty in this country by half in ten years and eliminating it completely in just three decades.

Like Gore on global warming, Edwards sees poverty not only as an American problem, but a worldwide problem, and that when we solve the problem of poverty in America, we are solving the problem worldwide, because it's going to take all of us, all over the world, to succeed.

Like Gore, he says we have to create a grassroots movement to make it work. Here and abroad.

Like Gore, Edwards challenges America to rise and to demand action from our leaders.

And like Gore, Edwards describes the joy of living in this time when we can do something the world has never done before: eliminate poverty worldwide.

That's something even Jesus, who said "The poor you have always with you," didn't think we could do.

Half in Ten. That's the name of John Edward's campaign to reduce poverty by fifty percent in ten years, with the goal to end it completely in this country within thirty years.

Public TV's NOW caught up with John Edwards in San Francisco at the Momentum Conference last spring where David Brancaccio interviewed Edwards on his Half in Ten campaign. Take a look.

Last week, Wall Street barons got 700-billion dollar bailouts from the federal government--enough to finance a war. While people all over the country, suckered by empty promises, lose their homes and jobs, the barons endure no threat of losing their multi-million-dollar mansions. Think your taxes won't go up to protect the lifestyles of the very rich?

But don't despair. With people like Edwards championing the poorest of us, who have no friends in Washington, there's hope. It takes true leadership to conceive and execute a plan to end poverty once and for all. John Edwards, and lots of people like you and me are standing up and accepting the challenge. They can't do it alone. It will take a whole lot of us on the ground working for change, but it is possible to end poverty in this, the third most populous country in the world, in thirty years.

To learn how you can help achieve what even Jesus thought no one could do, go to the halfinten.org website linked above, or visit From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half.

We live in exciting times, folks, and they are becoming more and more ordinary.

Fossil fuels are a gift

2008-09-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

If ever you wanted to understand the debate on climate change and why it's important to pay attention and begin doing our part, Roel Hammerschlag of the Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment spits it out nicely in a short speech he gives on behalf of Portland's Green House Network. You can read the speech here. Hammerschlag kindly includes his charts, bar graphs and source notes, so you can see what he's talking about, and so you don't have to take his word for it.

Prefer a more graphic approach? This geeky guy entertains while bringing the global climate change question to a screeching halt. Check it out.

That's far from Ordinary.

Small joys

2008-07-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

Commenting on my use of the phrase "small joys" in R&R, reader and fellow blogger Hayden says, "No offense meant, since I do it too - but I wonder why we call these 'small' joys, when intrinsically they offer the most profound soul-ease?"

"Profound soul-ease." Les mots just, and I am keenly grateful for your thoughts, Hayden. I thought hard about characterizing such moments as small joys, and for reasons you suggest:

It seems to me that the celebrated joys (all of the big expensive things) offer much less comfort, less solace than those of calm, relation to nature's other creatures, the natural world that we have (in large) repudiated except as a fantasy resort.

Big-ticket events and celebrations come with an expectation of big payoffs in the joy department. Weddings, island vacations, winning the lottery, tickets to the Superbowl--we plan and anticipate for months. Our anxiety for creating the perfect experience, and the subsequent exhaustion sometimes overwhelms any joy we may accrue by the time the big day arrives.

For me, the truly big joys, the ones that make my heart swell to bursting, tend to be things like the birth of a child; driving down Highway 1 and coming upon a pod of whales feeding, diving, breaching for an hour while we watched from the best possible vantage point; raising my voice in harmony in a friend's living room with two dozen amateur musicians who sing and play for the love of it.

Those are the big joys. At the end of the day, my face aches from smiling and I sleep long and hard and well.

But oh, how I love the small joys: my granddaughter's head falling onto my shoulder, nestled just so against my neck, as she gives in to sleep; looking up from my computer, where I've spent too many hours, to find the moon, full on in the living room window, its magical glow spread across the darkened floor; riding the escalator into the subway to the strains of Mozart performed live by a chamber quartet.

Such are the manna that sustain and nourish us. These are the moments I try to capture on the rare occasions I post to Village of Ordinary. What joys nurture you? Share a few of them here, won't you?

We can solve it

2008-07-23T00:47:00.000-07:00

Finally, a leader steps forward with a plan to solve global warming, halt the energy crisis, lower our energy costs, and clear the air for generations to come.

The real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures that are needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices.

Moreover, they are also the very same solutions that we need to guarantee our national security without having to go to war with the Persian Gulf.

Finally, someone with clout and respect is standing up and outlining a plan of action for solving the problem.

What if we could use fuels that aren't expensive, don't cause pollution, and are abundantly available right here at home?
...

Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within ten years.

Finally, someone notices that the emperor has no clothes and is not afraid to say so.

We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.

It's not surprising that the leader calling us to action is Al Gore. If you care about the future of human beings on our planet, I think you'll cheer out loud as I did when you watch this excerpt from Vice President Gore's July 17 speech.

It's up to us. You. Me. We can do it. Pay attention. Go to We Can Solve It and take five minutes to take a few baby steps toward solving the problem. Bookmark it and go back for five more steps and five more.

It will take all of us. Together, we can do it within ten years. Join me. Join the millions of individuals who have signed on to help solve the climate crisis and improve the quality of life for human beings the world over for generations to come.

That's definitely Ordinary.

R&R

2008-07-19T10:45:00.001-07:00

Pelicans Pismo Beach, CA 7/18/08, originally uploaded by graceonline2.

After weeks of 12-hour workdays and too much activity on all fronts, with the exception of researching and writing, alas, my sweetie and I are enjoying three days of much needed R&R at Pismo Beach with these guys. Small joys. Happy days.

Dancing with the daffodils

2008-07-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

It was a bit of a rough morning. I wasn't living up to my peaceful aspirations. The entire office was on edge. It got so bad that after awhile we exaggerated our angst, joking and laughing and bursting into snippets of song. The bosses stayed buried in their cubicles, waiting for the storm to pass, I suppose. One of my coworkers, as irritable and feisty as any of us, complained of feeling alone with her mountain of work.

"I'm wandering lonely as a cloud," she said. Someone took up the next phrase, "That floats on high o'er vales and hills." I added, "When all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils." And just like that, people returned to their desks, the very air seemed to change. Keyboards clacked and voices relaxed, responding to calls, one after another.

My heart slowed its hard, fast beating to a more comfortable, softer pace. My breath lengthened and sunk deeper, wider into my lungs. My shoulders relaxed. For just a second, I heard my mama's voice, her beautiful alto voice, quietly full of passion and glory so that we saw the blowsy wind amidst the daffodils, felt the coolish breeze.

When I was a little girl, my mama would quote the entire poem, probably does yet today. I give it to you here, complete, a respite perhaps in your hectic day.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
by William Wordsworth, 1802

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Dancing bears

2008-07-02T21:53:00.001-07:00

One of the joys of living in this time is the sheer volume of people who are doing something about the bad stuff in their neck of the woods. In Saving the dancing bears of India, Squidooer Frankster tells us about two warm-hearted souls who have rescued more than half of India's painfully imprisoned dancing bears, and are well on the way to rescuing all of them. They are Geeta Seshamani and Kartick Styanarayan, cofounders of Wildlife S.O.S.

I give thanks for the energy, commitment and love that keeps Geeta and Kartick going. I give gratitude for their compassion for the bears, and for their strength and courage. I give thanks too for the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), which works with the Kalandars to stop the practice of raising and enslaving the bears.

A nomadic people who have earned their livelihood for centuries exhibiting the dancing bears, the Kalandars were understandably reluctant to give up their primary income source. Through negotiation, education, and training, the WTI helps the Kalandars improve their quality of life while learning new skills and developing new income streams.

That's progress toward a much more Ordinary world, don't you think?

Making lemonade

2008-07-01T22:01:00.000-07:00

Inevitably, no matter how much we love and and cherish one another, a little bitterness comes between us at times.

Bitter is good. It wakes up the taste buds, gets the saliva going. Just the thought of digging into the peel of a bright yellow lemon sets your mouth watering, doesn't it? Squeeze, add sugar, fresh, clean water, and you've got yourself one of the most delicious beverages known to humankind.

If a little bitterness has come into your life today, dilute it, sweeten it, and enjoy. For me, Ilana Yahav's sand fantasy is just the sugar I needed after two very difficult days. Perhaps it will help to sweeten your cup as well. One thing is certain, you'll feel better after watching.

To all creatures everywhere suffering from some sleight, imagined or real, from a misunderstanding or ongoing difficulty you just can't seem to work through, I send love. May you feel as loved as a newborn babe, cradled for the first time in its mama's arms. May you feel as safe and warm. May you never doubt that love surrounds you, persistently and as and freely as the air you breathe.

Blessed be.

What is the ecological cost of air travel and is it worth it?

2008-06-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

Part of my family lives nearby. Another part of my family lives in another state, and the rest are scattered all over tarnation. I fly periodically to visit family. One year, I flew almost once a month. I knew that air travel was a heavy contributor to greenhouse gases, but I had a new grandchild four hundred miles away and aging parents six hundred miles the other direction. I chose to spend time with them, and that meant flying.

Because I need to visit my distant relatives regularly, and since it is unlikely I will have big blocks of time to travel by car, bus or train, it is likely I will continue to fly. To help me make decisions about how best to compensate for heavy carbon-emitting activities, I use tools like the carbon footprint calculator to assess my personal contributions to global warming. This page has good tips for reducing my footprint as well, including offsetting my air travel by avoiding cars and taking buses and trains at home, which I have been doing for several years.

Still, when you consider that most climate scientists believe we are very near the irreversible "tipping point" in global warming, air travel may be a dangerous luxury. For the past two years, conscious of the cost in CO2 emissions, I have flown less, but I miss my peeps.

People in the world of Ordinary like to visit distant relatives and friends as well. How should they get there? Are high speed trains the answer? If you nail a track across the landscape for thousands of miles this way and that, what is the cost to habitat? Can you lay the track in such a way as to account for animal needs to traverse the countryside in search of food and water, or perhaps simply to patrol their territory?

In the world of Ordinary, perhaps far less than our world today--where we crowd out wild animals to the point of extinction--trains might be a good solution. More to come on that.

Weigh in on this one, will you please?

Work as pleasure--What is your true Work?

2008-06-29T22:09:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling frustrated and discouraged. I have so much research and writing to do--work I crave and love. My body aches when I'm not doing it. Yet some weeks there is so little time even to check e-mail and respond, let alone return to the work of Ordinary. Last week, at my paying job, I worked 47 hours in four days. The fifth day I got to spend with our precious new grandchild and her mama--a joyful respite.

Yesterday was my monthly Saturday to work on the whales website. Five or six years ago I made a pledge in sacred space to build a web site about whales for kids. At that time, I had basic HTML down and felt confident in my ability to build a site, but the web was changing. Websites were becoming more dynamic, with lots of interactive features, and the old, static ways of putting up information simply couldn't compete in this vibrant, new virtual world. I knew I would have to learn how to build a glitzier, bigger website than I had ever dreamed.

For most of those years, I gave at least one Saturday a month to the project, a woefully inadequate amount of time. I don't retain information like I used to, and I found myself constantly training and retraining. No sooner would I learn one way of building a site, than it was obsolete. Soon, I was hopelessly behind. The web evolved a language of its own, and I wasn't learning it.

A few months ago, I found Lorenzi Davide's Dynamic HTML Editor. It claimed to build CSS, PHP, and W3C compliant web sites all in a WYSIWYG editor. Glory be, that's exactly what it does.

For the first time in five years, I feel confident I can finish and maintain the whales website myself. I am ecstatic.

It's going to take a lot of time to finish the writing and and to find enough images in the public domain, maybe five more years if I can only give it a Saturday a month, and I need to hire an attorney to assure I'm getting the legal stuff right, which means finding the money somewhere. The exciting thing today, though, is that the design is down, the basic pages are established, and it's looking fantastic.

In the first paragraph of this post, I confessed to feelings of frustration and discouragement. That's because of the time and energy factors. At sixty, I may not have many years left to research and clarify the vision of Ordinary, to continue to write the story of Rose, Cheyenne, Ruby and their friends in the Village and beyond. Then, working the long hours I do, how will I finish the web site? Once it's up and running, how will I find the time to respond to questions and do the site maintenance? A web site is never really done, you know. It changes constantly, and I've planned a lot of change for this one--keeping it fresh so children and teens who care about whales and want to do something to help them will return again and again.

So I feel discouraged, gearing up for another week at the office. I love my job. My contribution is fun for me and critical to the success of the company, but the truth is I'd rather focus all my energy on these creative projects--Ordinary, the whales website, my Squidoo lenses--so many in the planning and drafting stages!--and another website with a totally different theme, but just as important to building a world more like the Village of Ordinary than this one.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if every person on earth could spend our time doing what we most loved, that our contributions were rightly rewarded, and that we all felt cared for and supported in our work?

I hope you are finding ways to live your dreams and to do work that gives you pleasure and feels like your Work, not simply work-for-paycheck. I welcome your comments and hope you'll take the time to share your thoughts here.

May you all be blessed.

How Ordinary is flying?

2008-06-24T23:29:00.000-07:00

In Journey, Rose, Cheyenne and three friends fly to a wedding far to the north. Their plane is a small jet, with limited passenger seats. Though it's not mentioned in the post, the idea is that villagers rarely fly. When they do, they take a light jet.

Last year, Treehugger posted an article about the DayJet, a concept similar to mine in Journey. Nifty, but it doesn't solve the problem of air travel's excessive contribution to global warming. (I encourage you to take the time to read the discussion in the comments section of the post.)

According to Gristmill, flying is responsible for almost ten percent of the greenhouse gases warming the globe today. So far, no one has found a way to keep us all flying and reduce that statistic.

For now, we can stay home, travel by rail, car or ship, or buy carbon offsets when we fly. None of these is a good solution in our gotta-get-there-now world.

How do you address this problem? Help me find a workable, and quite Ordinary, solution.

Aquaduct--The tricycle that purifies water

2008-06-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

It is no accident that Anne Roiphe titled her book Water from the Well: Women of the Bible, nor is it surprising that Duke University Professor of Religion Carole Meyers illustrates her website, Making Biblical Women Visible with an ancient water jug. It has always been women who fetch the water. According to water expert James Workman in Fetching Water, 200 million women spend a good portion of their day every day searching ever farther from home for the water they need to sustain life.

So it is with a great deal of hope that I anticipate the move from prototype to full-scale production of the Aquaduct--a tricyle that purifies water while you pedal. If you took the time to read Workman's Fetching Water story about 39 year old Kgaugelo Morale's struggle to fetch and carry water for her household every single day, you'll understand why this tricycle is so promising as one possible solution for improving quality of life for women and their families all over the world.

For more on the prototype and the problems its designers must solve to make it affordable and useful to women in developing countries, visit their blog, The Aquaduct.

Many have said that the next world war will be fought over water, not oil. As the world's freshwater resources dwindle, technology such as the aquaduct will be more important for all of us--whether we live in developed or developing countries.

May we treasure our water supplies, rather than waste, and may the need for an Aquaduct become less and less ordinary all over the world.

Clocking the human-powered car at 80 mph

2008-06-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

Take a look.

"This one goes out to everybody in the whole wide world who burns gas...in their cars. Any-kind of gas." Based upon automotive technology with a patented bi-directional power interface and BodySteer^TM chassis the FM-4 prototype HumanCarÂ^® has rocked Seattle, Ashland, Portland and canyon roads at our private test facilities at speeds upwards of 60 mph. It is a supercar. No bike parts are used. http:www.humancar.com/faq.htm- Let us know when you are ready to alter your perception.
YouTube vlogger thehumancar

Now that will keep the weight off.

Share a bicycle

2008-06-21T20:46:00.000-07:00

In Xianne, Rose, Cheyenne and Ruby, accustomed to day-long hikes, walked twelve miles to neighboring Central Village, but they might have enjoyed a bike trek just as much. Bicycles are the perfect vehicle for a rural, village-centered population.

Imagine a phalanx of well-maintained bicycles available in key locations for any villager to pick up and ride away. Sound far-fetched? From Amsterdam to Austin, cities around the globe are doing just that. Take a look at the Big Apple's fledgling bicycle-share program.

From community isolation problems, to obesity, to air pollution, to war, there are so many problems this country has that can be solved if people would just get out of their cars and ride bikes more.
Jennifer Schaffer, a veteran Yellow Bike volunteer

Probably the first U.S. bike-share program was Portland's Yellow Bike, launched in the early Nineties. From that low-tech trust-and-ride to the high-tech Washington, D.C. program launched in April this year and modeled after the Paris Velib (means bicycle freedom), cities seeking answers to congestion, pollution and high energy costs are jumping on the two-wheeled bandwagon and heading out. To learn more, Google "yellow bike." On YouTube, search on "bicycle sharing."

In the wholistic world of Ordinary, the sound of the bicycle bell is likely to become as common as birdsong. Ching-ching!

$5 a gallon? Driving less? Share a car, beat the pump

2008-06-12T23:53:00.000-07:00

With Zipcar, you always have a car around the corner.
ZipCar

Ever thought about giving up your car completely? Like most families, ours once had a vehicle in the driveway for every driver in the household. Twelve or thirteen years ago, our children and their vehicles long departed, my partner and I realized that one of our cars sat unused for days, sometimes weeks at a time. We decided to give it away. We never missed it.

A few years later, we moved to the city and deliberately chose a neighborhood with excellent public transportation, sold our only remaining vehicle and subscribed to City CarShare. Getting downtown by bus or train takes 15 to 20 minutes with no hassles, no driving around for parking, and no parking garage fees. When we need a car, we reserve one online, walk the few blocks to our local CarShare pod, get in and drive away.

The cars are clean, fueled and well-maintained. Our only responsibility is to return them on time with at least half a tank of gas and as clean as we find them. City CarShare takes care of the insurance, oil changes, tire pressure checks, and pays for all of the gas we use. We pay a low monthly fee, mileage and a set rate for each hour we use a vehicle.

Last weekend we checked out a Prius hybrid overnight and visited our daughter and her family seventy miles away. The weekend before, we checked out a larger vehicle with a fold-down back seat and brought home an eight-foot ficus. Our plans this weekend don't require a personal vehicle. In fact, we may not need a car again for weeks or months.

Interested in finding a car-share service near you? CarSharing Net has a list. Some orgs are non-profit, like City CarShare. Others, like ZipCar are entrepreneurial and for profit. If you don't find a car share in your city, start one, like David Brook did in Portland, Oregon.

Sharing resources is one way we can work together to build Ordinary. What are folks doing in your town?

Next: Bicycle sharing abroad and here at home

Putt-putt--Sustainable vehicles in the world of Ordinary

2008-06-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

In Where I'm going--Short term I listed, in no particular order, some of the foundation issues I've been researching for Village of Ordinary. The second of those is a three-parter: How much do the people of Ordinary rely on vehicles, what kind of vehicles do they use, and how do they power them? One thing for sure: any vehicles in the world of Ordinary must be sustainable.

I'd like some help with this one. Please join the discussion. It's a big subject and one I haven't had much time to research. So far we have seen villagers utilize a truck, a small car and an airplane.

Broad-picture questions to answer:

What types of vehicles do people in the world of Ordinary employ? (e.g., planes, trains, ships, trucks, cars, motorcycles)
How are the vehicles fueled?
Are all vehicles fueled in the same manner?
For what purposes do villagers use vehicles?
What other forms of transportation do they use?

Vehicle musts:

Sustainable, local fuel sources
Non-polluting
Long operating life (no more planned obsolescence!)
Shared

What questions/musts am I missing? You are invited and encouraged to share your thoughts.

Tomorrow: City Car-Share and ZipCar, two options for urbanites who need a car occasionally.

Matt and Jessica Flannery--Changing lives one loan at a time

2008-06-10T23:58:00.000-07:00

Mrs. Regina Odije is a 56-year-old woman with six children. She trades in food items. She lives in an urban area of Benin City in Edo State of Nigeria.

Kiva

Jessica Flannery phoned home. A bride working in Africa, half a world from her husband in San Francisco, Jessica couldn't wait to tell Matt what she had learned about the way tiny loans from the Village Enterprise Fund, were changing lives. Loans of as little as $100 helped villagers start and build businesses. They were growing oranges, making baskets, forging recycled metal into farm tools. They drew on centuries of tradition, promoting ancient customs and crafts, while providing a better standard of living for themselves, their families and quite often their communities.

Matt joined Jessica for the last two weeks of her work in Africa, and soon found he was as passionate as she to find a way to match micro-lenders to entrepreneurs. Together they built Kiva, an online community of people like you and me who loan money directly to small business owners in developing countries. Read their story.
(Images courtesy Kiva.)

Learn how you can help someone turn a profit and put food on the table with a $25 loan. You pick the entrepreneur. You decide how much of their loan request you want to fund. Don't worry. Plenty of other people are filling in the gaps--at least two people loaned their tax stimulus checks to Kiva. Take a few minutes to learn how the system works, how Kiva helps you assess the risks and due diligence, and some fun facts.

Then come back and tell us all what you think about this project, helping people help themselves to a more Ordinary lifestyle.

Note: This is the third and last in our series responding to Anonymous' request for examples of people in her hometown of San Francisco who are making the world a little bit more Ordinary.

Mimi Silbert and the bottom two percent

2008-06-08T19:11:00.000-07:00

One of the most hope-inspiring organizations is the Delancey Street Foundation. It is run by Mimi Silbert, President and CEO, who is the second person featured in our three-part series of Ordinary San Francisco people. (Recall that at last post, we were looking at the first of three people in response to a comment by Anonymous, who asked for examples of individuals making a difference in her home town.)

To get a feel for the work--and miracles--of Delancey Street, watch this video. You'll be as amazed and inspired as I am.

If you have more time, watch this longer Discovery Channel video and get an in-depth look at Mimi Silbert's lifework, but more importantly, understand what her work means to the people whom she and Delancey Street serve. Learn how they do more than turn their lives around. Learn how they gain an understanding of what they've cost society. Learn especially, how they choose to give back.

There's not much more ordinary than that.