MamaStories

We will remember within what walls we live, and understand that this level life has its summit…. and we have only to stand on the summit of our one hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.

H.D. “Thorough” (as I now properly pronounce it), “A Walk to Wachusett”

Last year, in April, we held a Transition Training guided by an experienced, trained facilitator. She worked with us for two days, from 9 to 5, with unbounded energy! At the end of the second day she and I were the last ones left, packing up, when suddenly she confessed that she was horribly thirsty.

That day she had forgotten to bring her reusable water bottle, and though she had drunk at lunch from the reusable cups I had provided, she hadn’t drunk anything since then. The reusable cups and my own water bottle had already been removed.

Worried that she would faint, I came with her to the desk to ask for a water fountain and from there on to where they directed us. It was one of those tap fountains. Next to it stood a stack of tiny paper cups. You know, the ones with the pastel flowers and the inside layer of plastic which makes them virtually non-recyclable.

She looked at it and said, “I’ll drink when I get home.”

Home was over an hour’s drive away.

I said, “But Tina, you have to drink!”

She smiled and shook her head. “I’ll be alright!”

And she was.

I didn’t understand back then, but now I do. Now I couldn’t drink from that cup either.

I think activism has done that for/to me. Going public, face to face, with one’s principles, sticking one’s neck out, has made some of these  issues (like the throwaway cup) clearer, simpler, and so easier to deal with.

Other principles (like vegetarianism, hunting), it has thrown into question and confusion. Those I was  never really clear on, of course, but I may have thought I was. Now that I am more conscious of their praxis and because I practice them out there now, I have started the thought process and until I am clear on them, I will not so easily proclaim them anymore.

Standing up for one’s principles in public – training, speaking, meeting, etc. – throws up those summits Thoreau wrote about, from which we can get an overview of the landscape of our level lives. Only I would add that the landscape changes constantly, that we need to climb those summits more than once, to keep us honest and aware.

I liked Bill McKibben’s essay, “Armed with Naivety”,  for TomDispatch a couple of weeks ago. In it he proclaimed his New Year’s resolution:

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet.

Cynicism makes us say, “that’s how it is.”  This stops us from questioning the right or wrong of it and precludes the possibility of doing something about it. It is the ultimate powerlessness, and it is a powerlessness that we choose.

Naivety allows us to be surprised about things that aren’t right. Then it allows us to be rightfully angry. Then it allows us to know that it shouldn’t be that way. Then it pushes us to start believing that it could be different. Finally, it allows us to know that we can make it different.

That’s what McKibben calls hopeful – as against hopeless - naïvety.

If something is wrong, then we have the right to be upset about it,  the responsibility of hope that we can do something about it, and the duty to do so.

As Bill writes,

The big boys are, of course, counting on us simmering down; they’re counting on us being cynical, on figuring there’s no hope or benefit in fighting city hall. But if we’re naïve enough to demand a country more like the one we were promised in high school civics class, then we have a shot.

But I have found that my voice is the best way to move things.
And things need moving.

(This is a cross post with Wayland Voices – the Transition Wayland blog, where it’s not just me “speaking”.)

I’m reading Gura’s book, American Transcendentalism, A History, and on page 19 there it is:

Toward that end they called “for immediate application of ideas to life,” so that in this brave new world a thinker “was called on to justify himself on the spot by building an engine, and setting something in motion.”

Exactly. Let’s build this engine!

A Fugue.

I’m reading the newly arrived Life in the Soil. Actually, I’m devouring it. And it’s not even that particularly well or passionately written.

I started wondering about this as I marveled over acellular slime molds and trichomycetes and realized that I often take refuge in books about soil and geology when I am down about the state of the world. In the first days of my “awakening” to climate change, peak oil and what have you, I fed on McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, like Henry, swallowing all 712 pages whole in the matter of a week.

Why?

Glaciers, archaebacteria: they are the kind of Earth without us. The kind of Earth that, given enough geological time, will be there after we are gone. Maybe what I am looking for in these books is perspective. I mourn so deeply what we might lose, and it seems such a shame. But these books tell me that, in another scheme of things, it doesn’t matter so much. From the perspective of the glacier, of the lichen, we don’t matter that much…

Does it work? I lose myself in the text, in the imagining of these things so utterly un-human. That’s something at least. When I read about art, about philosophy, it’s all so thoroughly human. Even a medieval religious icon or a 17th century piece of music are tainted with my sense of loss, of futility. So, losing myself in this Earth-without-us helps take my mind off things.

But then there is always the moment when I come out of the text to be reminded that it was written by a human. The science was done by humans. That knowledge and imagination, once we’re gone, will be gone as well – all that work, all that passion – for nothing! True, the real thing will still be there, the lichen, the glacier, geological time. But here I am, just holding a book, and sighing too much.

Aren’t you glad this wasn’t another “tutorial” (remember “Calcium in the Soil,” in 8 parts)?

I was never a confident public speaker. I used to be a TA at the university where I did a lot of teaching, mostly to groups of 20 student, occasionally to an auditorium of 250. I would rehearse those hours meticulously, often to the point of learning the whole thing by heart. It was exhausting, but I did get better at it, more natural, and my students never complained. That was seven years ago.

Now here I am, an activist who needs to speak out publicly. And it turns out that public speaking is not like riding a bicycle. You don’t do it for seven years, you lose the knack.

For the first couple of Transition events I made sure I had strong invited speakers. All I had to do was the introductions. Even though I gladly followed the good advice to keep those short, I was still very nervous. I arrived at the events half an hour early, if not earlier, and over-rehearsed my three lines.

Soon the introductions became more elaborate, then  people started to notice me and wanted to hear from me – a Waylander – and not from an invited speaker who doesn’t live here. After all, that’s what Transition is about.

My speeches became longer. I love writing them, hunting for the words that perfectly describe the ever morphing idea of what Transition is. One day I hope I can distill it all into three sentences again. But for now, they’re half a page, 1 page, 2 pages…

My audience went from 2 (seriously) to 25 to 100. They are great audiences, they listen so intently. And they seem to like my accent and my voice.

But when I’m “up there,” I’m still fighting the flight-or-fight reflex, telling myself:

It’s the words that count, not the one speaking , and all she has to do is speak clearly so she can at least be understood. I am a channel.  I am merely a channel. These words speak for themselves. You’re doing the Work. It needs to be done. You’ll get better at it. People understand.

Public speaking, it turns out, is like flying. The more I do it, the more I fear it.

Why is that?

Yesterday my Transition colleague Wen (a fabulous public speaker) and I did our “Transition Talk” at the big Interfaith Thanksgiving celebration. You can hear an earlier version of that here, when we did it for the Episcopal Church on Saint Francis day.

Last week Thursday a group of us from Transition Wayland carpooled and took the train into Boston to add our numbers to the 99% at Dewey Square.  The special occasion was Bill McKibben’s visit. He was there to let the 99% know that the 1% is ruining it for the 100% for the sake of quick profit. He had some choice words about and for President Obama, especially about the XL Pipeline and the exploitation of the Alberta Tar Sands, which, according the NASA climate specialist Jim Hansen, would mean “GAME OVER FOR THE CLIMATE”.

Here’s the video I shot:

In other news, we burned our first fire in the wood stove. The perfect thing to redeem a  wet and chilly, gloomy day!

This comes pretty close to what I was trying to say.

“It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.
There is no movement without the first follower.
We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.
The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.
When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.”

Today I read this article about leaderless movements like Occupy Wall Street. The article itself doesn’t quite deliver on its promise (“The history of leaderless movements”), but it got me thinking.

When’s the last time you were part of a leaderless movement? Can you remember? No guru, no one spokesperson, no one hero or “example”?

Some of you were probably part of such a movement, but you didn’t notice. That’s because we are blind to it. We think that movements need leaders, or they can’t go anywhere, right? I mean, if there is no leader then who is the movement going to follow?

But a following is not a movement. It’s a mob.

Oftentimes people regale me with stories of brilliant and wise or exceptionally good people. I always thought, hey, kudos to them. But now that I’m in this “let’s move” mode, when most of my conscious thought is driven by The Work that is Urgent,  I’ve become mentally allergic to such stories. People on the pedestal are anathema to the empowerment of the many, of all. They are the ideal we can’t attain. They also absolve us of our own empowerment and decision making, and all that comes with it, like responsibility and sacrifice.

Now I know why I am drawn to that saying: we are the people we’ve been waiting for! “We”: you and I, all of us, we’re all heroes. We should be.

All we need to do is move. Move ourselves.

I realize that when I introduce Transition, I usually invoke Rob Hopkins. Though I try to stress that he’s a normal person like you and I, I still always end up implying that he’s a saint. I’m going to quit that. I’m going to stress: Transition is what *you* do, when you volunteer to restore that apple orchard, when you grow your own food, when you walk or bike instead of drive, etc.

The movement is not in or because of Rob Hopkins. Or Richard Heinberg or Joel Salatin or Bill McKibben. Yes, they are exceptional people, or rather, they have an exceptional grasp of what is going on and what we need to do. Yes, we should listen to what they have to say.

But they must not be our leaders. If they are, then it’s not us, moving, making a movement, leading ourselves. We can adopt their ideas, their principles, but real, lasting action will only come out of that if we make them our own.

On Monday evening there was an interesting meeting in my town, about a small wooded piece near a local pond that is under threat of the bulldozer and development. I wanted to go and hear what it was all about, meet the people organizing against it happening. Hear the arguments on the other side…

But I had spent most of the weekend “on the beat”: Moving Planet all day Saturday, on Sunday a presentation about Transition to my town’s First Parish Green Sanctuary Committee (which, I believe, I am now a member of), putting together a press release about the previous day, picking up the sandwich boards from the intersections, setting up some of our coming events, and in the late afternoon getting my neighborhood’s block party going.

So I stayed home, cooked a meal and had dinner with my family. We read books together and I took Amie to sleep. Then I read my novel (scfi-fi, these days, total escapism!).

I am now doing this kind of work, “volunteer activism,” pretty much full-time.  I email, maintain two websites, design fliers, write article, schedule talks and meetings, prepare presentations, and plot world domination plan events during the day, when Amie is at school and while she reads or does homework. The events, talks, presentations and meetings themselves happen in the evenings and over the weekends. That’s because that’s when people are “off work” and can come. This means I have very little down time anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining! I’m saying, like I often do when I describe Transition, that it takes the whole person: heart, hands, and head. Weekdays and weekends. On and off. I think that’s right, I think that’s how it should be. I live what I preach. I am moved by the cause day and night. I think I am lucky, that I don’t have to tear myself in two, that I carry my passion around with me at all times, at home and “on the beat”.

I’m still going strong and I’ve got my buddies looking out for me, making sure I don’t burn out. So one of them went to the meeting instead. And I could stay home, and take care of myself and my family.

I got a report in the morning.