Molting and whatnot

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. "Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" was his response. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." - Lewis Carroll

People say, "Change is inevitable." I wonder if evolution is. I have this super-unhealthy tendency to coast, and bury myself in the work I take on, which is probably pretty common. I just need to make more an effort to sit with myself and my choices, and really think about what I'm building towards.

I just had a birthday. Quite honestly, this past bday has been one of the hardest transitions I've ever had to work through, right up there with GraduatingCollege. (Most of y'all know why, involving an age-old promise to my grandfather). It took about 4 or 5 weeks of living under a relentless black cloud - but I'm climbing back. Somewhat like the scene in Homeward Bound, where the old dog finally claws out of the deep and lonely hole. Between this one and my next birthday, I feel myself getting ready to make whatever big decisions come my way and take on the changes that come along with them (though it is still, as always, ever so scary).

We generate our own environment. We get exactly what we deserve. How can we resent a life we've created ourselves? Who's to blame, who's to credit but us? Who can change it, anytime we wish, but us? --Richard Bach

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And HAPPY BIRTHDAY VISHODUSS!!!!!!!!!!

Rules For Being Human

Rule One:
You will receive a body. You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.

Rule Two:
You will be presented with lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called 'life.' Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.

Rule Three:
There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.

Rule Four:
A lesson is repeated until learned. Lessons will be repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.

Rule Five:
Learning does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

Rule Six:
'There' is no better than 'here'. When your 'there' has become a 'here,' you will simply obtain a 'there' that will look better to you than your present 'here'.

Rule Seven:
Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.

Rule Eight:
What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.

Rule Nine:
Your answers lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.


--Cherie Carter-Scott, From "If Life is a Game, These are the Rules"

Here's why I love Tina.. and why you should too.

y'all, i've got a fever. i dunno what happened. ima come thru tonight, but fyi, i am in bad shape. maybe that's why i was so out of it yesterday, the germs were attacking my system like white imperialists. fuckers.

sorry.

peace.
t.

Thoughts on approaching the 3 yr mark since my Indicorps Fellowship

Aug 2004. Committing to Indicorps was a decision among a lot of hard decisions I made back then. It's been a struggle to say the least, but I'm always growing, and hopefully, always learning how to be a better person.

Anyhow, I jumped into it- the Rural Design School fellowship- and something about trying to help empower people through their own creativity really clicked for me. The experience has informed and shaped a lot of what I've done since then. I know I'm committed to this work- community-building and arts activism- but I've had to work through some difficult thought processes. It's such fulfilling work, but I feel like there are so many balls perpetually in the air that I barely have time to recognize the rhyme or reason to my work, let alone the impact of it or the need for it.

For example, from the beginning, I was told that the first rule for community organizing is to immerse yourself in the community with which you work, to try to truly understand the deeper contexts and layers to what you see happening. But, at the end of the day, I've seen too many instances of organizers being unknowingly mocked, played, or (worst case) taken advantage of, by community members because these organizers are so oblivious to the fact that they are outsiders.

One of the most brutal reality checks I got was a conversation in India (while in the midst of 'immersing myself' in the community's lifestyle... living in a hut in the desert in 120 degree weather on the Indo-Pak border, living on less than $25/mo with a 2-hour commute to a hospital or internet) when someone reminded me that, at the end of the day, no matter how bare boned I choose to live, I'm still an English-speaking, college-educated, American-citizenship-holding woman with access and options. I think that one conversation set the course for all of my decisions since then.

I can be one with people in struggle and solidarity, but I have to acknowledge my privilege. It's a perpetual separator, but such a great gift.

I don't know if I have a point here. I am still learning. Working through all these diametric and circular thoughts I have swirling around in my head: guilt-complexes; understanding why people choose hate and anger instead of constructive work; wondering if grad school is a next step for me- and a method to understand how macro-level systems and institutions affect my work- or if it is me, stalling in the work I could be doing; understanding coalition building vs. separate community empowerment; mediating the difference between ground level, grassroots work and working on higher-up, systematic change; how one can begin to define 'effective' or 'successful' work in a space where change isn't quantifiable; how anyone can consistently and sustainably keep pushing forward with work that can be so frustrating and exhausting ...

I feel like I'm in a perpetual storm of wanting to do good while keeping my work, motives, and priorities in check. I guess, when everything is said and done, I'm still trying to figure things out, just farther along then I used to be. But the great thing is that like attracts like, and I'm surrounded by amazingly inspiring and beautiful people that challenge me to keep going and push me to imagine all the good I am capable of- if I can keep my head up (lately, keeping my head up has been one of the toughest obstacles I've faced).

I'm also super grateful that we live in a time of people like this getting the attention and credit that brings good work to the forefront.

as the world keeps getting smaller.

http://flickrvision.com/

beautiful concept. :)

Art Activism

"Art activism is not a service to be bought or sold, but art that defends and agitates towards change, tries to clearly articulate issues, has the ability to remind us of the connections between us, thereby inspiring the people to devise strategies and actions."
—Alice Lovelace in I Was Singing You

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.

"On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced," said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. "While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don't have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them."

In 2002, Fultz's team shook the academic world by conclusively proving the existence of both bad ideas during brainstorming and dumb questions during question-and-answer sessions.

--the Onion Newspaper

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AND... the link to the Chicago Public Radio recording of our Looptopia performance. If the link doesn't work, go to www.chicagopublicradio.org and search for "looptopia".

http://www.chicagopublicradio.
org/Program_AMP_Segment.
aspx?segmentID=10896

I wished to live deliberately

"I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to
die, to discover that I had not lived."-- Henry David Thoreau

May 11th, 2007

Marks the first performance I have ever directed. :)

(It was recorded for Chi Public Radio; I'll get the link up once I have it.)

In other fantastic news: I just found out some of my work will be published in an anthology! More word to come...

updates: (brought to you in lazy powerpoint bullets form)

* my dad's bday celebration- went to see the Dalai Lama speak, organized a picnic, and got my dad and dada tickets to his private teaching. :)

* CA was amazing. Rage was fantastic, and the entire experience was worth the trip. QT w/ Hardee and my brother at the concert, planning w/ double oh, and catching up w/ anup. good times.

* work is still taking over my life. but it's great. between the website development, grant writing, market research focus groups, program planning (we are now planning fall 2008!), event planning, recruiting and hiring artistic directors and authors, and editorial work- it's like getting 2349823098 graduate degrees hands-on. with that being said, i am exhausted, and i feel like burnout is always something on my radar.

* vish graduates this year. holy god.

ah, quotes

"how can i go from seeing rage against the machine live to the dalai lama? is it going to be an acoustic set?" -vim

"fine, don't go. hang out with your friends."
"no, i'm coming. i'll feel guilty all night if i don't come home now."
-me and vish, in the moment i discovered i am becoming my mom. :)

"my seester! you up for some cultural learnings this weekend?" -vero trying to get me to go out

Inspiration from Nipun

"I'm a missionary today. I have decided to convert stares into smiles.

It's 4:50AM. A man on bicycle, riding hands-free, is singing devotional songs; I feel a current of positive vibrations as he passes. I smile. A bit later, four guys jogging -- two of them without shoes -- at a 10 kilometer/hour clip; they are easy converts and smile back at my smile. Then, a cow stares. So I smile, fold my hands and do a half bow. Unfortunately, the cow keeps staring. :)

Inviting stares, threatening stares, i-am-confused stares, get-lost stares ... it doesn't matter. I'm going in, head first, to do my job.

Candidate number 17, probably: a semi-toothless man standing outside a Hanuman temple at 6:35AM. I match his stare with a rock solid smile. But he's a tough one to crack. He keeps staring. So I pull out other tricks up my sleeve.

"Kaka, how are you?" I ask him. Still no response. He nods his head, as if too lazy to speak. I wave. Still nada.

Ok, time to pull out all the stops -- "Is this is the right way to Madhi?" Three others are far in front of me by now, and it's a straight road, so it's a really stupid question. But what the heck. Still staring, the old man in his kurta and pajama finally makes a sound, "Hmmmmmmmm."

I smile real big -- and I mean real big -- do a half bow to him and start walking. "I guess you can't win 'em all," I say to myself. But this is good business, because in the worst case, you are left with a smile on your own face."

From http://nipun.charityfocus.org/blog/ar/pilgrimvedchi/000651.html