The Sense Pleasures

"How many people live their lives in pursuit of the happiness that comes from the pleasure of the senses, the mind included? It is most people! This is the ordinary, mundane realm that most people live in. Before we know it, we're at the end of our lives, not having been fulfilled, because they (the sense pleasures) are incapable of bringing fulfillment. Precisely because each one is not lasting.

We need to decide how much of our lives we want to dedicate to the pursuit of these sense pleasures, because the pursuit will never end."

-Joseph Goldstein

Words

"Wherever I go,

with whomever I go,

may I see myself as less than all others,

and from the depth of my heart,

may I consider them supremely precious."

-H.H. The 14th Dalai Lama

African Words

"It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty,
a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities;
a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought.

How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it,
or living in it.
How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it,
if you have to."

-Alexandra Fuller
Scribbling the Cat: Journeys with an African Soldier

Govinda

"Just as a white summer cloud, in harmony with heaven and earth,
freely floats in the blue sky from horizon to horizon following the breath of the atmosphere;
in the same way the pilgrim abandons himself to the breath of the greater life that...
leads him beyond the farthest horizons to an aim which is already present within him,
though yet hidden from his sight."
-Lama Govina,
The Way of the White Clouds

service

"young people often ask us how they can address issues like sex trafficking or international poverty. our first recommendation to them is to get out and see the world...to tackle an issue effectively, you need to understand it-and its impossible to understand an issue by simply reading about it. you need to see it firsthand, even live in its midst....
one of the great failings of the american educational system...is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad."
-Nick Kristof, Half The Sky

Vision

Mccurry's eye and his philosophical awareness of his subjects and surroundings are astounding....a visionary.

Cornucopia

"It is as if our cornucopia has, through its very abundance,
robbed human beings of their human dimension. It has placed
such emphasis on the economic roles people play that is has
reduced them to the sum of the jobs they do, plus the things
they consume. This, in turn, acts as a spur, for what happens to
a person without a job or one who cannot consume the right
things in sufficient quantity to gain him some respect?
-David Maybury-Lewis

Reminder

The reminder of possibilities,
is like balm on the chapped skin of the soul.
intrigue in all its facets,
a photo glanced over many months ago now comes alive,
the context of dreams propelled
wonder, curiosity, humanity, potential
the forbearance of will
the boundaries of truth,
ordinary limitations vanquished from the mind,
possibilities all that remain
guiding, leasing, capturing, flowing

Critiquing the Critical Elements of Development

"In reality, development for the vast majority of the peoples of the world has been
a process in which the individual is torn from their past, propelled into an uncertain future, only to secure a place on the bottom rung of an economic ladder that goes nowhere."
-Wade Davis

Research into both the areas of International Development and Cultural Preservation, one comes to a crossroads, where a pivotal question begs to be answered:
Does "development" have an ultimate, objective aim in the modern world?
And a larger question: how do we balance the human right for an education, for
clean water, for life saving medicine, the chance for opportunity, with
the integrity of tradition, the power of myth?

Wade Davis places the burden of proof on the West..."Schooling has not changed the people for the better. This is the pain in my heart. Those educated want nothing to do with their animals. They just want to leave. Education should not be a reason to go away. It's an obligation to come back."

If it is a reason to come back, if it does, as Roy Williams says, "Compartmentalize Reality," what use is a modern education to traditional societies if the young people are, in fact, not coming back? Is it our right to deny the chance to not come back? Does this equate to progress and opportunity?

Davis adds that tradition is "ultimately what will save them."

How can we enmesh educational progress with traditional values? How can the worth of a traditional culture be defined, preserved, honored, without the inevitable watering-down influences of the West? What is true definition of progress? Who decides what is progress?

sitting in the cafe.

sitting in the corner of the cafe
the stranger smiles,
was it at me? a mirror? a thought? i look back down, ears open to the world, eyes closed.
speaking a distant tongue
a conversation i will never understand
a conversation i will never know
lives being lived, an eternal busyness,
buzzing, floating, wafting, transferring, energy all around,
a jigsaw puzzle of currents
colliding, smoothy,
changing, the patterns
never the same.
my own current drifting slowly below the surface,
observing, watching, distant, enmeshed, seperate

Beginner

Peering into momentary reflection
the mind shines
a mirror of itself
and then lost
the river floods its tenuous banks
beginners mind.
the sun's rays blindingly strong against my winter skin,
closing my eyes,
to wander.
the freedom of the road stalks my awareness.

Currents of Hope

$80.
This is the amount of money that stopped a young man's education in its tracks, an amount unobtainable for a poor farming family in Malawi. This young man, William Kamkwamba, "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," then decided to build a windmill in his back yard, using scraps of metal, outdated books, and a spark of the human spirit that has opened my eyes to possibility. Working autonomously, sitting in a dank local library ingesting outdated books, this young man defied famine, defied poverty, defied critics, and produced something glorious, a symbol of promisel. Something selfless that has changed the life of his village. This flash of ingenuity is both breathtaking and paints a portrait of hope for the future, a future so often riddled with setback and pessimism. This is William's story, "Moving Windmills."




A passage from his wonderful book....
"I paused and studied the flecks of rust and paint, how they appeared against the fields and mountains beyond. Each piece told its own tale of discovery, of being lost and found in a time of hardship and fear. Finally together now, we were all being reborn."

thinking...

sitting on the steps, in the sun, at Columbia University yesterday, reading Wade Davis' magnificent prose, words arose like air bubbles in my consciousness....

weaving together a fabric of existence
using the threads of a shared humanity
creating a new path,
untrodden,
planned yet free
spontaneous serendipity.
open to a chance,
yet closed to fear.
everything changes.
courage in exploration.
incorporating passion,
reinventing interest,
untraditional, nontraditional, unbiased, nonbiased
moments
but always looking
never content
freedom