Awakening is no longer a luxury

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"Times are difficult globally; awakening is no longer a luxury or an ideal. It’s becoming critical. We don’t need to add more depression, more discouragement, or more anger to what’s already here. It’s becoming essential that we learn how to relate sanely with difficult times."
- Pema Chödrön

A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.

When the going gets tough the tough turn to Pema Chödrön. She reminds me that peace on any level starts with a heart softening, and the easiest heart to soften is my own.

This week, another week in which violent and angry religious, ethnic and political groups scared me to the bone, I found comfort and encouragement in her writings, and in a Jewish Kabbalistic teaching: none of us can heal the world by ourselves, nor do we need to complete that work. But each of us can do something to work toward a peaceful world, and none of us can stop, even when our actions feel small.

Both Pema and Kabbalah remind me that an act as simple as looking at and acknowledging another person is a beautiful and powerful means of making and spreading peace.

Happy Friday.

Civic Engagement
"Imagine what would happen in our communities if we slowed down enough to look at one another."

Wendy MacNaughton is an artist and graphic journalist who lives in San Francisco. She says that like so much of America and the world, her city has grown increasingly fractured.

"As the profoundly wealthy and the deeply destitute attempt to share the same city blocks, I've noticed a heartbreaking side effect of this disparity: We don't see each other anymore."

But, she has a tool that helps her notice what and who she might otherwise ignore, her pen. She uses a technique called blind contour, a.k.a. look closely. Recently she wondered what would happen if she invited strangers to try it, even—especially—if they didn't know how to draw.

This is a delightful graphic essay about her experiment. "Participants were stunned by the connection they felt with someone they hadn't met before, even after just 60 seconds."

Graphic Essay: The Importance of Looking at What (and Who) You Don’t See

Human Potential
Enlightenment as a group experience

"According to 16th-century Kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac Luria, the idea of 'enlightenment' was not some individual personal goal to escape mortal limitations and gain knowledge, but a group process by humans to assist the Divine in bringing creation into alignment with the original plan—i.e. 'on earth as it is in heaven.'" - quote and art by Martha Jablonski Jones. (Found on Facebook.)

Learning, Activism
"The Commons Social Change Library exists to make activism smarter and stronger."

For many who feel that the human world is in need of love and repair, direct action and community organizing are not hobbies. The Commons Social Change Library exists to make activism smarter and stronger. They gather the collective wisdom of people engaged in social change in one accessible online place. The library includes 1000+ educational resources. All materials are free, digital, and directly available.

"The Commons Library includes educational resources on campaign strategy, community organizing, digital campaigning, communications and media, working effectively in groups, fundraising, diversity and inclusion, and much more. Resources are available in a range of formats including videos, podcasts, manuals, case studies, articles, practical how-to guides, and training materials."

Website: The Commons Social Change Library

Personal Development
"Don’t be afraid to be an idealist," and 16 other insights that Maria Popova has learned in 17 years of publishing one of the best newsletters in the world.

17 years ago this week Maria Popova published the first issue of Brain Pickings, a must-read digest of "how our temporal, marginal lives shimmer with meaning". Two years ago she renamed the letter the Marginalian, reborn, she said, "as what it has always been beneath the ill-fitting name chosen by a twenty-two-year-old immigrant in whose ear the tired puns and idioms of a non-native language rang fresh and full of wonder: an evolving record and ongoing celebration of my readings and my loves, of all that makes me feel most alive."

On the seventh anniversary of this delightful missive she set down some of the most important things she had learned about living in the course of writing her "personal record of reckoning with our search for meaning". Ever since she has added one new learning a year, while changing none of the previous. So this year she's up to 17.

Lesson number 15 is an elegant, two-word summary of all of the coaching she shares: "Outgrow yourself."

Article: 17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian

Futures Thinking
The opportunity to usher in a new Renaissance.

Sometimes our opportunities seem so vast as to be insurmountable. But breaking big visions into discrete buckets makes them seem more doable. We don't all have to do everything, but we can all do something.

Spencer R. Scott is on the science team at a climate-focused nonprofit called One Earth. He also co-runs a sustainable demonstration site, Solar Punk Farms, with his husband. In his spare time he thinks about the future and writes a great newsletter, As If We Were Staying.

He sees the transition to a civilization operating with ecological principles as the opportunity to usher in a new Renaissance.

He holds up Janine Benyus's identification of some of Life’s Principles here on Earth:

Life runs on sunlight.

Life rewards cooperation.

Life builds from the bottom up.

Life banks on diversity.

Life recycles everything.

Life builds resilience through diversity,
decentralization, and redundancy.

Life optimizes rather than maximizes.

Life selects for the good of the whole system.

In short, life creates the conditions conducive to life.

- Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature

Then he uses these principles and the work of sustainable development scholar, Jiahua Pan, as inspiration for an "ingredients for an ecological civilization" list.

Article: An Ecological Civilization is the Renaissance We’ve Been Waiting For

Teaching
How a group of elementary school teachers are using their schoolyards as a way to apply lessons about rising temperatures to the real world.

Students using an infrared thermometer to record temperatures in locations around their school's playground and yard, including asphalt and green spaces. Beth LaBerge/KQED

"Across the country, climbing temperatures have led schools to cancel classes and outdoor activities to protect students from the harmful effects of the heat.

"Jenny Seydel, an environmental educator and founder of Green Schools National Network, encourages teachers to leverage students’ observations about their schools to make learning come alive. ...“We can learn from a textbook. We can memorize concepts. We can use formulas, but we don’t incorporate that learning until it is real,” said Seydel.

"Against the backdrop of climate change, Roosevelt Elementary School teachers turned to their schoolyards as a way to apply lessons about rising temperatures to the real world. While these issues can seem overwhelming to young students, exploring them within the context of their school can not only make lessons stick, but also encourage students’ sense of civic agency." - Nimah Gobir

Article: Why Schoolyards Are a Critical Space for Teaching About — and Fighting — Extreme Heat and Climate Change

Related Article: What Are the Primary Benefits of Eco-Schools?

Advertising, Social Messaging
A multifaceted campaign that motivated citizens to change their electricity consumption practices.

"We don't just need to do more to save the climate; we also need to do less. Less driving, less meat consumption, fewer plastic packages, and fewer long-distance trips." - Eric Zinn, Sustainability Manager at Göteborg Energi.

When the City of Gothenburg, Sweden signed the EU Climate Contract agreement, they committed to reduce its fossil emissions by 70% by 2030. To make this vision a reality they made their city-owned energy company, Göteborg Energi, a pivotal player.

The company recognized that electrification is a key to unlocking a greener, more sustainable future, but their research showed that people needed to understand that using less energy was perhaps even more important.

So the energy company turned to an integrated communications campaign to help people to understand the implications of electricity consumption. The messages were delivered through both bought and earned media channels. The campaign also promoted a downloadable app that empowers residents to make more sustainable choices in their daily lives.

Before and after surveys reveal that perceptions did change, and more importantly, so did behavior.

Article: Empowering Gothenburg: A Game-Changing Campaign and App Launch for Sustainable Electricity Consumption

One-liners

Article: The cover designs of 11 of the most banned books of the 2022–2023 school year

Article: Walkable neighborhoods associated with lower risk of some cancers – study

Article: The ‘greenest’ US cities, evaluated based on 28 key indicators using data from 21 sources

Use instead: Plant-based, plastic-free dish soap and deodorant made by a couple living and working out of their home

Article: Global carbon emissions from power sector may have hit key turning point.

Article: The number of airport workspaces has nearly doubled in the last year.

Playlist

Video: Sly & The Family Stone - The Midnight Special, Everybody Is A Star

In the mid-sixties, Sylvester Stewart, a San Francisco radio DJ and sometime record producer with an education in classical composition, reinvented himself as Sly Stone. In 1966 he started a band, Sly and the Family Stone, a racially and gender integrated group that blended soul into what was still a new sound, psychedelic rock. Their first album, A Whole New Thing, flopped.

Then in 1968 they released a second album, Dance to the Music. Sly described the music as being simpler, and "more people understood that". Writing in The Guardian, Alexis Petridis says about the song of the same name: "It was the first of a string of incredible singles – Everyday People, Stand!, Hot Fun in the Summertime, I Want to Take You Higher, Family Affair – that turned Sly Stone into one of the most influential figures in soul music. He became the man who ultimately caused the Temptations to transform themselves from the performers of My Girl into the makers of Cloud Nine, Psychedelic Shack and Ball of Confusion; who cleared the path for Parliament-Funkadelic; whose uncompromising way of handling things paved the way for other Black artists, including Stevie Wonder, to wrest control of their careers." As one measure of the band's influence, whosampled.com reports that their music has been sampled more than 1.000 times.

The rest of the story is rather tragic. Most of Sly's subsequent years are filled with stories of the downward spiral of drug addiction. But now, at the age of 80, Sly Stone has released a memoir, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir. Clean since 2019 but in very poor health, he is now talking, albeit by email, about how he and his first-of-its-kind band changed music, fundamentally and for ever.

Interview: ‘I Never lived a Life I Didn’t Want to Live’: Sly Stone on Addiction, Aging and Changing Music for Ever.

Weekly Mixtape
It is impossible to think of how contemporary soul, jazz and rock music would sound today were it not for Sly and the Family Stone.

Playlist: Sly told me to come.

Image of the Week

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA’S PING-PONG TABLES, AS INSTALLED AT REMAI MODERN IN SASKATOON, CANADA, IN 2019.
Photo Blaine Campbell/Courtesy Remai Modern

"Rirkrit Tiravanija’s lively MoMA PS1 show, a strong candidate for the year’s finest New York museum exhibition, is a challenging experience. This is not because the art included is tough—although it does offer plenty of food for thought (and, in a few cases, for digestion, too)—but because the work on hand calls on viewers to do more than merely see it.

"On at least three occasions, visitors are asked to lie down to experience the works. On two, they are given the opportunity to play music—including their own, made via guitars and a drum set, in one installation resembling a recording studio, minus a soundproofed wall. And, for one centrally placed artwork, visitors are even given the opportunity to perform a game of ping-pong; paddles, balls, and a table await players." - Alex Greengerger

Article: Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Bracing MoMA PS1 Survey Is One of the Year’s Best Museum Shows

What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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You can learn more about me and my work here: mitchanthony.net

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