Hope

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons ...Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
"
-Havel

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Reflections on Retreat

Thoughts from the Shambhala Tibetan Winter Retreat I have been attending here in London...

The way of the warrior; fierce grace. There are few things challenging as sitting for 8 hours every day, no distractions, only a simple cushion, a bell, and your mind. Our society has conditioned us our entire lives for distraction, for multi-tasking, for clouding over our minds with the busyness of the world; what a challenge, then, to simply sit, to uncover, to unwrap, to spend all day looking directly at your own mind. To uncover what we hide from; to sit with pain, to sit with difficult emotions, with nowhere to run, nowhere to distract; simply to sit with what is.  Having the dignity, the courage, to stop running. Waking up. Crazy Wisdom. This is the journey.


I thought of a night, recently, caught out in the cold of a trendy part of London, walking to meet friends, marveling at the huge lines of people, waiting to get into clubs, bars; 
the effort, the energy; driving, planning, waiting, working, 
and I wondered for what; 
for what where all these people looking for? 
They were chasing something, looking for something in those lines, standing out in the cold December air; looking for happiness, contentment, perhaps? Do we really know what we are seeking?



"We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end, it's always the mind that creates our experience of the world, and translates that experience into either well-being or suffering. If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by mind training."

-Matthieu Ricard

Tea

When asked by his disciple, studying tea ceremony under him for 10 years, what the reason for the practice was, Sen no Rikyu, the great, ancient, master of the art, replied:

"The reason for Chanoyu (tea ceremony) is simple. First you boil the water. Then you prepare the tea. And then you drink it. Thats all. 

Sensing his student's disappointment, at learning that this was what he had spent his last 10 years doing, Rikyu replied:

Show me someone who truly understands these things, then I will become that person's disciple."


The challenge in making tea, as in everything in life, is to do it with attention undivided, so we are not running through our day while making tea. Beautiful simplicity in this ancient anecdote.

"Africa's Year of Living Dangerously"

"Sub-Saharan Africa's economic gains came under threat this year, but public demands for good governance to address the continent's problems holds promise for the future"
-Shanta Devarajan, The Guardian, Dec 25, 2011  http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/dec/21/africa-economic-year-living-dangerously


Yet another insightful article on from the folks at The Guardian's Development Blog. 
The crux of the argument here: key progress has been made in macroeconomic policy in many African nations, the case in point being the tightening of monetary policy in response to inflationary pressures across East Africa this year (politically difficult); the ability to make a politically difficult decision amidst global economic downturns can be a sentiment to a number of factors: growing authoritarianism and a lack of concern of popular discontent (as can certainly be the case in Ethiopia) or a general delinking and independent growth cycle (as can certainly be the case both in Ethiopia as well as Kenya and Tanzania); but moreover, a sense of optimism for the future, of a longer-term time horizon being used by the leadership and planners in these nations. Time horizons are the critical element here that will differentiate ruinous, short-sighted policy, with sensible, growth-oriented, progressive policy that will gradually impact the majority of a society over the short term elite vested interest drives (that we have seen in the US, for example). These factors breed optimism in the growth trajectories for many African nations. 
A main point made by Devarajan has been the impact of cash transfers to the poor as a key method for weathering the global financial turmoils and domestic economic and agricultural crises. These direct cash transfers, though they necessitate a certain level of technological and bureaucratic infrastructure to enable transmission, as well as the concern for graft and opportunities for graft they might introduce, have been seen as more effective in introducing personal empowerment into these situations. This harkens back to Amartya Sens' entitlements and empowerments arguments; if people have the economic and social ability to obtain entitlements, famine and destitution can be averted (subsequently, most famines are not due to lack of food, they are market failures caused by a lack of these entitlements). Thus, the combination of macroeconomic foresight and long-term stable planning with short term entitlement distribution might be the key recipe for many moving forward.

 

words

listening to cries of the geese, their patterns strung out, oblique, obtuse, flying into the frigid early morning sun, their wings ablaze in golden light,
the pale blue sky,
the sound of snow crunching under my boot amplified by the silence, the utter silence.

Ethnocide

"The problem isn't change. All cultures, through time have constantly been engaged with a dance of new possibilities about life. Its not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power. The crude face of political domination...Genocide, the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of a people's way of life, is not only not condemned, but it is universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy. You cannot understand the pain of Tibet unless you move across it, at ground level...

In the end, it comes down to a choice. Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony, or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?"

-Wade Davis

Oil for Life

The natural resource curse, aka: Dutch Disease, combined with a historical degree of plunder by successive, misdirected, and tainted leaders, both military and civilian, have left the citizens of Nigeria

in worse living conditions than 40 years ago, despite many hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue accruing to the federal state. This looting and mismanagement has been well-documented, and there is no need to reiterate points already made clear on the misuse of natural resource revenue; however, in looking at the increasing environmental damage, the recent Shell oil spill that is now covering 350 square miles and approaching the fragile, mangrove shores filled with subservience fisherman, one can not ruminate on how much better off these people would have been had oil never been discovered within their territorial borders. The press coverage of this newest environmental catastrophe has been minimal; I think back to the Gulf of Mexico spill dominating world press for months and it paints a pale comparison to this newest spill. The story did not register in a roll call of world news on Google. Another environmental catastrophe bestowed upon some of the world's most vulnerable and underserved citizens by large, Western, multinational chemical companies. Certainly not the first time, and with increased drives for energy exploration and globalization, this will not be the last. Are these people's lives and livelihoods somehow worth less than those of the citizens of the Gulf coast of America? Are their lives not worth the same level of regulations and press coverage that lives in the West take for granted? Despite the common multitude of  statements to the contrary, this certainly seems to be the case, reinforced, once again.

The Worth of Tradition?

"What is the worth of family bonds that mitigate poverty and insulate individuals from loneliness? What is the value of diverse intuitions about the cosmos, the realms of the spirit, the meaning and practice of faith? What is the economic measure of a ritual practice that results in the protection of a river or a forest?"

-Wade Davis, The Light at the Edge of the World


The idea of tradition gets trampled like a leaf under the foot of an elephant in the modern discourse of development. China is seen as the model for the rest of the world; the lifting of 600 million out of poverty in 30 years, surely a remarkable feat, deserving of emulation and praise; however, one might ask, what is the price that has been paid by the Chinese people in their drive for economic prosperity? What has been the cost to family bonds, to the traditional culture and languages that have held this most ancient of cultures together over the many centuries? What has been the cost to the thousand year old traditions of the Tibetans, no longer able to practice traditional culture and religion in the land of their birth? What is the cost of the relentless drive for development, for material prosperity? Can we tell a hunter in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, sustained by the land, nourished by family, that he is impoverished? Is he any poorer than a banker working 80 hour weeks for money he cannot every possibly spend?

Language

"More than a cluster of words or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit, the filter through which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. A language is as divine and mysterious as a living creature...each language is, in itself, an entire ecosystem of thought, an old growth forest of the mind. Each is a window into a world, a monument to the culture that gave birth to it, and whose spirit it expresses."


-Wade Davis, The Wonder of the Ethnosphere, The Light at the Edge of the World