Six Grassroots Activists Awarded 'Green Nobel'

Jim Lobe
Apr 24 (IPS)

Six grassroots activists -- including three who, at great personal risk, exposed illegal logging in their home countries of Liberia, Brazil, and Papua New Guinea -- have been awarded this year's prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize ... more

Moving house

I'm in the process of moving house, so the weblog's a bit slow at the moment ...

More Than Words?

There's a recent news report that highlights the power of words. The Polish Culture Ministry has asked UNESCO to change their official listing of the nazi concentration camp site in Auschwitz in the register of World Heritage Sites, from "the Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to the "former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp". This call for a name change has set off an international argument about memory and commemoration and the adequacies and inadequacies of narratives and histories. More about the story can be found here.

Away for a few days ...

I was away back home in Northern Ireland for a few days and in Norwich on a personal retreatish kind of visit to a friend, so I now have a backlog of things to write about here, plenty of things thought about, plenty of things learned, plenty of things to ponder. It may take a few days :)

Double Meow

After weeks of training Tammy the cat (not the one in the picture) has managed a double meow.

Meow-meow.

My IKEA Initiation

Well, I am no longer an IKEA virgin. What a bizarre environment to walk through.

What a deeply seductive and carefully engineered labyrinth of identikit domesticity.

I will become so much more me by becoming so much like everyone else.

I did come away with some useful ideas for making stuff, though :)

Further reading:

The Riddle-Language of the Goddess Ikea
http://www.parentheticalnote.com/dabbene_goddessikea.htm

Ikea - a global phenomenon of popularity?
http://www.jmk.su.se/global02/jessica/popularity/index.htm

The pleasure and pain of Ikea
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4254181.stm

Surf Rage

Surfing can be a wonderful way to wind down, or even meditate. I'm one of those lucky few Irish people who has managed to actually try it out, with a little but not much success (I managed to kneel up on the board rather than stand up, but I did catch a few waves). There's a lot to be said for those moments when you just hang out on the water. (I think I'm going to need lots of water around if I ever settle.) Very nice.

There's a craft and a crafting to be learned and plenty of teachers about.

That said, there are not so good social pressures going on in certain places.

I have been trying to find more information about three surfers who were arrested in a federal park in San Francisco in March after allegedly attempting to kill another surfer who might have intruded onto "their" wave. If any one has any more info on this, please let me know.

Also, I'm having difficulty working out whether the following is an urban legend or not. I have found it listed all over the Internet, but nearly always with the same wording, and nowhere with any more information than ...

"Two surfers went to court after one had allegedly stolen the other surfer's wave. The case was dismissed after court officials found it impossible to put a monetary value on a wave".

Again, if anyone has any more details ...

Surf Rage
http://www.drdriving.org/rages/surf.htm

http://www.natyoung.com/surfrage.html

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/news/11/27/australia.surfing.reut/

A Circuit Court judge sentenced a surfer to six years in prison for surf rage assaults ...
http://starbulletin.com/2006/01/20/news/story08.html

An Australian surfer accused of “surf rage” was banned from riding the waves at nine Sydney beaches
http://www.7days.ae/2006/03/03/you-stole-my-wave.html

Surf Rage Hoax (2004):
Journalists from across the country descended on Portreath in Cornwall last week to witness for themselves what one national newspaper described as the "surf rage" that threatened to "cripple the thriving local tourism on which the town survives". But this week the threat of all-out surf wars receded when a group of marketing and journalism students claimed the whole thing was a hoax - and boasted they had hoodwinked the nation's media.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1357552,00.html

'Localism' intensifying at ocean breaks:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/15/SP97503.DTL

Hey man, like, is surfing mellow and laidback?
http://www.wavescape.co.za/top_bar/tidings/oneoffs/surfrage/
LongBeach_Surfrage.htm

Surfrider group focuses on surf rage campaign
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s987606.htm

Santa Cruz tries to tame surfing wars Brochure spells out unwritten etiquette for dropping in on a wave
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/03/04/BA120105.DTL

The violence of necessity?

I would like to suggest that taking a position of gentleness need not be utopian, unpragmatic, or involve participation in some unrealistic, delusional dreamstate. It may be to live a life in which the focus of critique (for me) continues to be the conditions and thinking and behaviour that foster and facilitate force, coercion, violence, domination, and oppression, in whatever form, and especially when I am the one participating in such conditions, thinking, and behaviour. As I suggest on the front page of this site, for me an attitude of gentleness is actually more political than many other alternatives I have come across.

Somebody recently mentioned a Gandhi quotation to me where he says, "Where there is a choice between cowardice and violence I would choose violence" (Declaration on the Question of Violence in Defense of Rights, 1938).

I would like to ask the later Gandhi if he still agreed with this. I don't find it terribly helpful. I would suggest that if we think that any situation can be reduced to a choice between only two positions then we misunderstand the complexities of the situation.

I've sometimes heard it said that there are times when violence is a necessary response to violence. Other people hold whatever positions they hold, but I work with the idea that "necessity" tends to be a rhetorical declaration for the purposes of justification and legitimation rather than the statement of "fact" it is often positioned as. I have found that this tends to be exacerbated when it comes to the "necessity of violence". Knowing what it's like to have grown up in a place where people dying violently on the streets (but usually not my street) becomes accepted as normal allows me no necessary hierarchical privilege of sacred knowledge or revelation when it comes to making sense of violence, and provides me with no easy justifications for claiming violence as a necessary option. I would actually be less likely to trust myself in thinking about these things if I had allowed such violence to remain 'normal', or even 'okay', for me. I've seen how the contagious spirals of violence work. I would rather work towards more gentleness and an attitude of healing than participate in the intensification of violence. That's a position I have worked to and one which I will stick with for the foreseeable future.

People think what they think, and thankfully different people tend to think differently. But I am responsible for my own awareness of how I myself think. I believe that what we think matters because it tends to have consequences what we do and for how we relate to/with people.

Daedalus, The Maker

Daedalus, The Maker
(for Seán Lucy)

Dactylos was silent and impersonal;
hidden behind false names, he achieved
a powerful persona. There was only
his work; a chipping of rock into form
and the rhythmic riveting of bronze,
diminishing his need for company.

Learning to keep silent is a difficult
task. To place Art anonymously at
the Earth's altar, then to scurry away
like a wounded animal, is the most cruel
test-piece. A proud maker, I have waited at
the temple doors for praise and argument.

Often I have abandoned an emerging form
to argue with priests and poets -
only to learn the wisdom of Dactylos:
that words make the strangest labyrinth,
with circular passages and minotaurs
lurking in the most innocent lines.

I will banish argument to work again
with bronze. Words, I have found, are
captured, not made: opinion alone is
a kind of retreat. I shall become like
Dactylos, a quiet maker; moving between
poet and priest, keeping my pride secret.

Thomas McCarthy

"Why I write" (an essay by the poet): http://www.laoisedcentre.ie/LENGLISH/engrwww/tom.html

More information:
http://www.irishwriters-online.com/thomasmccarthy.html

Crafting Jesus ...

There seems to be a running churchy theme for the day, but this was too interesting:

http://www.dltk-bible.com/mjesus.html

The juxtaposition of toilet roll with the figure of Jesus makes me think of the humanizing intention of the 'cagador' in the corner of Christmas cribs in Catalunya (a figure of a man squatting in a scatalogically-engrossed pose) .

The Church of Craft

I had to check to make sure this wasn't some kooky front for an evangelical phalanx, but apparently not ...

"By promoting creativity, we offer access to a non-denominational spiritual practice that is self-determined and proactive. The Church of Craft maintains no dogma or doctrine beyond what every member believes for themselves."

Cool :) (albeit a little weird with the whole 'church' thing)

http://www.churchofcraft.org/

University Bullying

So, I've worked in a number of universities at this point, and studied at a number more, and I will admit that it can get a little disheartening sometimes. I hold out hope that there is room for honest scholarship and heart-blossoming education in this world, but again and again I see friends and colleagues with teacher-sparkle getting squashed, mangled, and crushed by working "communities" of toxic nastiness. Only in the last few weeks some teacher-sparkle friends of mine were targeted for ("voluntary") ejection by senior managers in a university that shall remain nameless for legal reasons. They were accused of gross misconduct without any charges being specified, blamed for the "untenable working situation" of "irreparable relations" without anything other than unspecified "anecdotal evidence" (that being, slanderous lies issuing from secret vendettors), and banned from speaking to their colleagues and students or from attending campus. As it happens, word is that the justifications were flimsy (i.e. non-existent) because they simply didn't matter - all that mattered, apparently, was the reduction of working costs in the faulty, sorry, faculty concerned.

The Union my teacher-sparkle friends belong to is unfortunately, despite their best intentions, unable to do much, if anything. Management can do what they like, until or unless they are brought to court, and even then the dice are loaded in favour of those with the money for fancy lawyers and with the luxury money affords you for protracted legal engagement.

If anyone out there is having problems with intrastaff bullying in universities, take a look at the following sites:

Workplace Mobbing in Academe

Bullyonline.org

Universities 'bullying weak research staff'

And if you're in the mood for a wry but, sadly, increasingly accurate site:

"The AIU recognises that bullying is an increasing phenomenon in Australian universities. The reason that most bullying occurs is due to a negative attitude on the part of an SSP (Subcontracted Service Provider, otherwise known as an academic). The Australian International University will act firmly and decisively to congratulate and protect any member of management staff who is accused of bullying academic staff. We recognise that bullying is often necessary to maintain performance standards among a group of people (SSP's) whose attitude to excellence in service provision often leaves something to be desired.
SSP's are usually people who are not sufficiently competent to work in real-world occupations such as banking, finance, marketing and management. Their lack of real-world competence often means that they require extra incentives to perform at a level that is consistent with the AIU’s approach to service provision and customer focus. The AIU has a strong commitment to incentivation and believes that bullying is an excellent means of incentivating our SSP's to work harder and faster. " More where this came from ...

So, yes, the whole university institution thing can get a little depressing in certain circumstances, but, of course, there are some good people out there doing their best to put more teacher-sparkle into the heart-blossoming of people a.k.a. students.

There are also, though, other ways of thinking and doing, wouldn't you know, surprise surprise, stop the presses and all that. There have been and are a number of exciting university-ish projects out there that celebrate education in the broadest possible way. From the polish "Flying University" (that once nurtured the scientific curiosity of Marie Curie) to the incipient Autonomous University of Lancaster collective, there are people out there taking head-and-heart education seriously, in a spirit of play, analysis, critique, and not a little resistance.

It doesn't cost money to gather people together and chat about thinking and ideas. It doesn't cost money to teach and learn. It helps if you have time to spend in the company of other people, but that's pretty much the key condition. The rest is more or less window dressing.

If you have a space in your house that would fit more than three people, and if you have more than three friends, invite people around to your house and have a chat about what education means to you all, and about what it can mean, in the broadest sense of possibilities and other ways of thinking and doing that you can imagine. Help each other to think about your thinking, to challenge your thinking, to think in many different ways at once and see what settles once you've worked out what's important to you. Have fun, but stay present. :)

Check out the education section of the Hope Archive

Water

I've almost always lived closed to a body of water, or at least near to a river. I think that's one thing about living in Sheffield; I'm about as far from the coast as I can be in the North of England.

A friend of mine in Chicago once mentioned to me that she liked living beside a large body of water like Lake Michigan because it allowed her to feel small. I don't think she meant it in the sense of insignificance, but in the sense of being humbled in the face of the immensity of that-which-is-not-you-but-relates-with-you.

I like water. No, actually, I love water. I like the way that water is always moving, even when it's still.

I find water helpful for reminding me that nothing is fixed, nothing is necessary, nothing has to be the way it is. That remains a very difficult idea to carry around with me, when there are so many people going around declaring that so much is fixed, so much is necessary, and so much has to be the way it is. I've often made such declarations myself.

Difficult or inconvenient the idea may be, but it remains helpful, indeed, so helpful that it pretty much provides the support for my understanding of hope in the world.

Water, it seems to me, invites me to think very much about 'how' more than 'what', about relationship, about literally 'going with the flow', about listening to situations. Bruce Lee went for a stroll with a similar idea:

"Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can *flow* or it can *crash*! Be water, my friend."

Some people might take that as an invitation to be a doormat, to submit to people, to subordinate yourself to situations. But I don't think that's what he was on about. I think it was about flexibility, about appropriateness-to-context, about being aware of changing conditions, about being more fully present. The structure of the final section of Bruce Lee's movie Game of Death unfolds these principals in narrative form through various fight scenes, as Lee adapts his fighting style to the distinct styles of each fighter he encounters on his way up the tower. While I may not be the greatest fan of oppositional fighting styles in martial arts, the movie for me provides a strong reinforcement of the key principle of fluidity and adaptation, key values in how I wish to think about gentleness.

When water is restricted it eventually becomes stagnant, unhealthy, unwelcoming, toxic. But even when water is stagnant it remains fluid.

Nothing is fixed (though much tends to be stable)
Nothing is necessary (though much tends to be helpful)
Nothing has to be the way it is (though it's important to understand how things happen to be).

Writing gentleness

Welcome to the crafting gentleness weblog. This may or may not work as a regular blog (my history with such things is pretty dismal), but I'll give it a go. Of all the blogs I have started, I think this one is closest to my heart, and something that I think I can dedicate myself to. We'll see.

I suppose one of the things I am slowly learning about gentleness is that the words I say or write matter so much less than the kind of relationships I foster. It's far more important to me now that I spend quality time in people's company than that I communicate so-called information accurately or successfully. I am reminded of something that Maya Angelou has said (perhaps in her 70th birthday interview with Oprah Winfrey):

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel".

Words. I think a lot about words, the frustration of words, the frequent pointlessness of words, the power of words to raise us up and crush us down. But I am quite taken by the thought that the more we think words matter, the less words tend to matter. Or rather, the more we are distracted by the presumed importance of words in a particular situation, the less likely we are to be aware of the colour of the relationships in that situation, or of the textures and currents of power. More to the point, the more we get hung up on our words the less aware we may become of how we are treating the people around us. I'm sure there are plenty of times in my life where I have subtly or not so subtly disrespected people I have known or even people I have loved because I was so intent on getting my word out, so intent on speaking 'my truth', so intent on naming my islands and making my mark. Sometimes shutting up isn't all that bad.

Shutting up isn't what this blog is about, though. Still, I hope that this blog ends up being more about heart than head, although I'm sure that the pull of the written word will keep my inclinations towards abstraction pretty close to the surface. Nevertheless, I hope that this blog will allow me to revisit the glory of story, the grain of the heart, and the warm caress of the spring sunshine of possibilities.