I am reading many things lately that resonate with me so deeply that I simply can't leave them locked away in the Ivory Tower.

Here is a short passage about the meaning of spirituality:

"The term spirituality as currently used, indicates both the unity at the heart of religious traditions and the transformative inner depth or meaning of those traditions. . . . It supplies a term which transcends particular religions and it suggests a non-reductionist understanding of human life. It is more firmly associated than religion with creativity and imagination, with change, and with relationship. It is less associated in the popular mind with hierarchies of gender, race or culture.

It indicates an engagement with, or valuing of human experience and expression through art and music, through a response to nature and to ethical ideals as well as through the great religious traditions. It can embrace secular therapies and cosmologies as well as concerns with the environment. Thus it seems to include both sacred and secular, and to enable a fundamental rethinking of religious boundaries.

Its very ambiguity and flexibility suggests a richness and texture which allows traditional religious maps to be redrawn and minorities to find a voice [and this also] makes it a more flexible concept than religion and encourages the user to reflect and to challenge institutionalized thought."

By: King, Anna S. (1996) ‘Spirituality: Transformation and Metamorphosis’, Religion 26:343–51.

So beautiful (sigh). And yes, it is an incredibly romantic rainy day here on the West Coast.

Participate

courtesy of: http://www.artfinders.com/printart/wysockic/images/wysocki_-_too_pooped_to_participate%5B1%5D.jpg

I have a background in Biology, but I've decided to do an Arts-based thesis for my Masters degree. This is mostly because I felt like my creativity was stifled to hell in the natural sciences and I didn't feel like I was allowed to put enough of 'myself' into my work. So when I read a passage like the following, it makes me very, very happy (because I am now allowed to do it!)...

"...Participatory action research is aware of its inevitable intervention in the social situations within which it operates and seeks to turn these to consciously-applied effect. Most participatory action research sets out to explicitly study something in order to change and improve it. It most often arises from an unsatisfactory situation that those most affected wish to alter for the better (although it can also arise from the experience of something which works well, which provokes the desire to reproduce or expand it).

The moving to new and improved action involves a creative ‘moment’ of transformation. This involves an imaginative leap from a world of ‘as it is’ to a glimpse of a world ‘as it could be’. Where existing situations benefit or promote some but disadvantage or subordinate others, then creative change may be construed as ‘political’. As well, participatory action research does not conceptualise this as the development of predictive cause-effect theory (‘if this, then that’). Instead, as in the slogan: ‘the future is made, not predicted’, it is more like ‘what if we…, then maybe’. Possibility theory rather than predictive theory. That is, human actors are both wilful and capable of thwarting research prediction, and wilful and capable of selecting and implementing theories or probabilities they want to see manifested! Conventional science sees this as undesirable ‘contamination’ and ‘bias’. Participatory action research sees this as a goal, and the stuff of which ‘real life’ is made or enacted...."

From: Wadsworth, Yoland. 1998. What is Participatory Action Research? Action Research International

mobile gift

courtesy of: http://www.paulnoll.com/Oregon/Pleasant-Hill/p-home-mobile.jpg

there is this woman who has come in
a few times to the community centre
where i work

and she has blonde hair and
blue eyes
like me
like my mother

and she asks me to fill up a
bucket with hot water
so that she can wash her hair
and she keeps all of her
belongings in a shopping
cart that she watches like a mother
hawk
because, she tells me, she is an
artist and one day all of her
paintings were stolen

and we talk art
and for a moment the huge gaping
chasm between us
is closed

and i can understand where she is coming from
free of awkwardness and guilt and worry

Last week she brought me
a mobile
made of driftwood and painted
fish
she said she found it
and it reminded her of me
and that she would keep it
but her cart is not big enough

and then she asked me if i would bring her shampoo
for the next time
and i feel myself tottering on the rickety bridge built between us

Move

courtesy of: http://blog.gaspanik.com/archives/img/guitar_woman.jpg

"It took me too long to realize that I don't take good pictures,
cause I got the kind of beauty that moves......."
-ani difranco

Wild Spirit Places

courtesy of: http://www.wildernesscommittee.org/campaigns/rainforest/lower_mainland/stoltmann_wilderness/reports/Vol24No06/welcome

"Kayachtn is the word for welcome in the Squamish language.Welcome is what we say to the world as we approach the 2010 Winter Games. Welcome is what we say to all peoples who want to witness the beauty and strength of our traditional lands.

As part of this welcome we have prepared a gift-a gift to the world. We have identified the last pristine areas of our traditional territory and set them aside as a natural legacy, for all time. They are called Wild Spirit Places-places where the vitality, beauty, and power of nature is still strong..."

-Chief Bill Williams, Squamish First Nation

This week in Whistler with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, we were raising awareness about the Wild Spirit Places. These are areas in the Squamish/Whistler area that the Committee has collaborated with the Squamish Nation Youth Ambassadors to protect.

The Squamish Nation is currently made up of approximately 3,000 Salish people. In 2001, this Nation created a land use planning process for the wilderness of their territory in response to their growing concern about development and logging in the area. Consequently, the Squamish Nation Band Council designated Wild Spirit places that would be protected from logging and industrial development.

There are currently seven areas proposed that have Wild Spirit Place status. Altogether, they include 100,000 hectares of beautiful snow-topped mountains, glacier rivers, ancient forests, and endangered species. Some of the animals residing within them include Grizzly Bears, salmon, wolves, Bald Eagles, moose, and Northern Spotted Owls.

While the Wild Spirit Places are protected areas, they are not parks since they haven't been designated by the provincial or federal governments. Instead, they are created by the Squamish Nation government to encompass more than official parks. Along with protecting ecosystems and species, these areas have also been put in place with the goal of conserving and showcasing the Squamish Nation's spiritual and cultural landscapes, including sacred areas and locations of traditional traditional stories and ancient hunting grounds.

So far the government has not yet officially recognized the Wild Spirit Place designations.

To put a little pressure on them, contact BC Premier Gordon Campbell at:
Legislative Buildings, Victoria, BC V8V 1X4
premier@gov.bc.ca
(250) 387-0087

For more info, check out:
www.squamish.net
www.wildernesscommittee.org

Frank Gehry deconstructs

courtesy of: http://www.meteo.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~robert/Photos/2004_Prague/dscn0852.jpg

I was in jazzerific Seattle a month ago and was completely blown away by its wacky modern architecture. In particular, the Experience the Music Project's twisted metal walls and garish colours required some investigation...

Apparently, the concept for the 140,000-square-foot interactive museum at Seattle Center was based on the shapes and colours of an electric guitar. It was created by Frank Gehry, a famous Canadian-born architect known for his structural approach to building design.

Gehry's style is derived from late modernism. The tortured, warped forms of his creations are considered expressions of deconstructivist (DeCon) modernist architecture. DeCon is different from modernism in that it de-emphasizes societal goals (ex. speed and universitality of form) and the requirement to be of use (ie. "form must follow function").

Gerhry's creations often juxtapose space and material. For example, he will use odd, protuding shapes to contrast simple geometric forms. He also uses a mixture of both common and uncommon architectural materials (e.g., raw plywood, corrugated aluminum, and exposed pipe) to give his buildings a purposely unfinished look.

Check out a shot of Gehry's 'Dancing Building' in Prague (above).

Systems thinking

courtesy of: http://www.viewfrommywindow.net/archives/cat_daily_polyphasic_thoughts.php

Here's an exerpt from an interesting article on Systems Thinking I'm reading for school:

"...self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything. We can't find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror.

...Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however—waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of "doing." The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can't surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can't impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.

We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them...I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people.

...Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity—our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality..."

From "Dancing with Systems", Donella Meadows's unfinished last book

A Fairy Went A-Marketing

courtesy of: http://lair2000.net/fairy_poetry/poems/market.jpg

Here is one of my favourite childhood poems, out of my grandmother's beautiful fairy book that she brought for me from England:

A Fairy Went A-Marketing
By Rose Fyleman

A Fairy went a-marketing
-She bought a little fish;
She put it in a crystal bowl
Upon a golden dish.
An hour she sat in wonderment
And watched its silver gleam,
And then she gently took it up
And slipped it in a stream.

A fairy went a-marketing
-She bought a colored bird;
It sang the sweetest, shrillest song
That ever she had heard.
She sat beside its painted cage
And listened half the day,
And then she opened wide the door
And let it fly away.

A fairy went a-marketing
-She bought a winter gown
All stitched about with gossamer
And lined with thistledown.
She wore it all afternoon
With prancing and delight,
Then gave it to a little frog
To keep him warm at night.

A fairy went a-marketing
-She bought a gentle mouse
To take her tiny messages,
To keep her tiny house.
All day she kept its busy feet
Pit-patting to and fro
And then she kissed its silken ears,
Thanked it, and let it go.

The History of Blogging

courtesy of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Hall

People keep asking me where the term "blog" came from, so I did a little digging. This is what I came up with:

Justin Hall (photo above) is widely known as the earliest blogger. He began over 11 years of his web-based diary in 1994 while studying at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, although at that time blogging had no official name.

Check out his blog at: httep://www.links.net/vita/. It's really cool.

In 1997, Jorn Barger, who, incidentally, is also famous for "Robot Wisdom" (or cybernetic psychology), came up with the term "weblog" to describe the process of "logging the web" while he surfed. The shorter version, "blog", then was coined by Peter Merholz in 1999, who decided to pronounce it "wee-blog". This term was soon shortened to 'blog' , and the weblog editor was called a 'blogger'.

Numerous bloggers view blogging as a means of 'Open Source Politics', whereby people can have more direct participatation in the political sphere. Blogging is also seen as a way to sidestep the media filter and get messages out more directly to the public.

So there you go.

Guerrilla Gardening

courtesy of: http://publicspace.ca/gardeners.htm

I'm thinking of doing my Master's thesis on Guerrilla Gardening since it ties in well with my obsession with urban space and my love of plants. I'm very excited about it, and so thought I'd share a little blurb from my proposal intro. If you have any questions, insights, or know of any academic studies that have been done on this topic, I'd love to hear from ya!

Guerrilla Gardening

The Guerrilla Gardening movement is characterized by the reclamation of urban environments. In essence, it consists of transforming urban spaces, such as unused City land or vacant lots, into food gardens, flower beds, and/or political art forms, using a do-it-yourself (d.i.y.) approach.

The term ‘Guerrilla Gardening’ was coined in the 1980s after the Green Guerrillas, who pioneered the movement in New York. In Manhattan's lower east side, the Green Guerrillas planted gardens among the burnt-out slum tenements. Full-scale community gardens eventually emerged from the initial squats by activists and low income tenants.

Following the gardens’ establishment, local traditions and ethnic minorities prospered. The communities were empowered by their ability to have access to and connection with nearby land, despite the zero tolerance policy of New York’s mayor at that time, Rudolph Giuliani, under whose rule many of the gardener’s activities were criminalised.

The application of Guerrilla Gardening itself is ancient; Gypsies practiced it for generations, planting crops along the roadside and then returning to collect the harvest.

They're eating our parks!

courtesy of: www.redfern-gallery.co.uk

I just started canvassing with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, a job that requires me to go door to door, inform people about current environmental issues, then charm the socks off them in hopes of petition signatures and/or memberships to our fiesty little non-profit. We are entirely membership-based and youth-driven and we get results. I like it.

One of the things I like best about it is learning, and then informing people about, what's going on behind the eco-scenes. A disturbing thing happening right now is the BC government's consideration of distributing our park land to mining companies. The South Chilcotin Mountains Protected Area, located 100km north of Whistler, is currently set to have its boundaries rolled back by as much as 20% to accomodate the mining lobby's demand for access.

It is interesting to note that Teck Cominco, BC's biggest mining company and supporter of the the BC Mining Association's South Chilcotin lobbying efforts, is one of the biggest donors to the BC Liberal Party, contributing $56,590 in 2003.

Funny how these sorts of news tidbits fall through the cracks of the mainstream media...

For more info, check out:
www.saveourparks.ca

Complain to BC Premier Campbell at:
Rm. 156, Parliament Building
Victoria, BC V8V 1X4
Tel: (250) 387-1715
Fax: (250) 387-0087
premier@gov.bc.ca

I love you, Ladybug

courtesy of: www.whatcharockin.com

[Ladybug:]

That's right so

Step into the jams

Let the sugars make you sweet

Kept it underhand cause the planets get you free

Ladybug mecca with the groove in time and space

With the funkin rhythm butter chase

[Butterfly:]

Goddam....

-The Digable Planets

After a nine year separation, New York's funkalicious Digable Planets have reunited. Tonight I went to see them heat up the cool Victorian night and was completely blown away by the amazingly talented Ladybug, one of the groups' three lyricists.

I can barely express in words how empowering it was to see a strong, intelligent woman take centre stage in one of my favourite music forms, hip hop. Hip hop has the potential to be extremely powerful and act as a strong messenger for change, should it choose to be so. But often it takes the form of "hip-POP" in the words of K'Naan, and only promotes bullshit materialism, misogyny and violence.

In the face of this entrenchment of mainstream musical control and commercialism, it is so refreshing to watch the Digable Ps rise up again from the rumbling underground, and to hear Ladybug's wise lyrics speak straight to our hearts and souls.

Thank you, Ladybug and the DPs, for uplifting myself and your many other admirers tonight. You demonstrate in vibrant colour that it is possible to live a life without surrender.