AWAKE: Art, Buddhism and the Dimensions of Consciousness

AWAKE: Art, Buddhism and the Dimensions of Consciousness
By William Severini Kowinski

(as published in Urthona (UK) Issue 21 2004-05.)

In 1999, independent art curator Mary Jane Jacobs was exchanging news with her old friend from college days, Jacquelynn Baas, former director of the University of Berkeley Art Museum and an independent curator based in northern California. Jacobs told her that some New York City curators had noticed that a number of artists were getting involved in Buddhism, and their interest was influencing their work. These curators were talking about sponsoring a program on the role of Buddhism in contemporary art.

"It's about time," Baas responded. "There really should be something like that on the West Coast, too---historically, demographically, this is where a lot of Buddhist influence really happened."

So while the East Coast started the Buddhist Project, Baas and Jacobs organized a western U.S. consortium called "Awake: Art, Buddhism and the Dimensions of Consciousness." Centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, it also included educational efforts and public programs in Los Angeles, Dallas, Seattle, Portland and Chicago. These public programs began in the Bay Area in 2001 with an exhibit of Zen painting and calligraphy at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, a performance of Mien (Southeast Asian) Ghost Tales at the East Bay Center for Performing Arts, and a Buddhist film festival at the Castro Theatre. Programs continued into 2004 with "The Circle of Bliss: Buddhist Meditation Art" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and in 2005 a Richard Tuttle exhibition will begin at the Dallas Museum of Art. Other programs may still be scheduled into 2006 and beyond.

Cloud Gate Dance Theater

In between were several dance performances (Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan at Berkeley, for example), a large exhibition of Korean Art of the Goryeo Dynasty at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, and residencies by contemporary artists Alison Knowles and Helen Mirra in the Bay area, Arlene Shechet in Seattle, and Suzanne Lacy at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.

But for all this activity, Jacquelyn Baas believes the heart of Awake was a series of more private events. "The Buddhism Project in New York emphasized public programs," she said. "We began with a series of seminars for arts professionals. We really wanted to educate programmers in the arts in this important cultural area, and we wanted to affect how institutions present their art to audiences."

AWAKE organized eight invitation-only, weekend conferences for some 30 arts curators and directors of visual and performing arts institutions from all over the U.S., but mostly from the West Coast. Held every few months between April 2001 and February 2003 at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, these meetings were designed to explore various issues involved in the relationship between Buddhist meditation and contemporary art. So participants heard artist presentations (video artist Bill Viola talked about his meditation practice and showed video excerpts, for example.) They observed demonstrations of a Japanese tea ceremony and flower arranging, learned walking and sitting meditation, and participated in Indian dance.

The main event of each weekend was the presentation and discussion of a "white paper" previously circulated. These papers were presented by psychologist Eleanor Rosch (University of California at Berkeley), writer Marcia Tucker, Ken McLeod (Executive Director of Unfettered Mind, a Buddhist teaching and counseling service in Los Angeles), artist Suzanne Lacy, New York psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein, literature scholar Linda Bamber (Tufts University), art critic( and practicing Buddhist) Kay Larson, and artist and musician Laurie Anderson.

"It was wonderful," recalls Hollis Ashby, Associate Director of Cal Performances at UC Berkeley. "We all work in a very fast-paced environment and don't often have the time to slow our own processes down to consider other elements of art and experiencing art. But we were captive for three days and had to experience the world in that moment."

Some of that work was done by Green Gulch itself, a Zen temple that is also a working farm, in a lush and remote valley just a short walk from Muir Beach. "Just being in that atmosphere encourages you to really focus, so you aren't thinking about the next project or having your feet in six months from now," Ashby added.

But being "where the cell phones don't work" (as Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, UC Berkeley Art Museum put it) was only the first step. As presenters, they were mulling over ways to enhance the experience of audiences. "I believe in the power of contemporary art to effect change," Jacobson said. "At least on the a level of personal perception and self-awareness."

Though one attraction of the meetings was being among "a very high level and potentially influential group," Jacobson found that "we started talking about things we do professionally as a practice rather than a career. I like that idea very much, and that's something I've really adopted."

For Jordan Simmons, artistic director of East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, it was a glimpse into how the other half thinks. "The contemporary art world has its own language for social justice and social inclusion, and I was not so aware of it," he said. " I was pleasantly surprised that some of the artists were contemplating issues that are very important to community based organizations."

All the participants interviewed felt they learned a great deal from these meetings, and several made changes in their professional and personal lives as a result. "I'm a complete novice," Hollis admits. "Most people there had some kind of meditative practice, but I didn't. So this was something I hadn't considered before-how does having a practice influence an artist's work. And how could someone like myself learn from that to improve my own awareness when I'm experiencing art."

"I'm interested in the notion of 'Beginner's Mind,' of always bringing a fresh perspective," Jacobson said. "I do these conversations with artists in public programs, and I used to prepare a lot of questions in advance. Now I'm listening more, and I'm more interested in what's occurring as we are where we are. I think I've done more effective and interesting-and perhaps more truthful---conversations."

Some of the seminars had effects focused and reinforced by events in the world. Several participants noted that the first presentation after the events of 9-11-01 by Ken McCloud on "Impermanence," which included a series of meditations on death, was particularly powerful.
Suzanne Lacy's presentation on "Engaged Art, Engaged Buddhism" occurred as subsequent political and military events began unfolding.

Another conference event often mentioned was the "Dharma Combat," a verbal exchange between student and teacher, demonstrated by Kay Larson ( who practices with John Daido Loori at Zen Mountain Monastery in New York) and Yvonne Rand (who began practicing at San Francisco Zen Center in 1966, and was a leader there for 28 years.) " Kay and I both realized afterwards that we communicated to the group something about the fruits of meditation that I'm not sure we could have done in any other way," Rand recalled."...that another person's suffering is my suffering, it's not separable."

With her knowledge of Zen practice, psychology and art, Yvonne Rand was a pervasive presence throughout "Awake." She served on the steering committee, and since her home and meditation center (called Goat-in-the-Road) is close to Green Gulch, several conference participants as well as visiting artists involved in "Awake"-sponsored events, stayed there.

"It depends a lot on the particular artist, but I certainly am convinced that the mind in the moment of creativity and the mind in the moment of meditation are the same mind," Rand said. " It is an openness sometimes called in Buddhist practice 'the mind of don't know.'" She finds it in contemporary artists from Korea whose work was featured in an "Awake" exhibit at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, and she finds it in a famous modern artist like Degas. "There's a quality in his sculpture that resonates with anyone engaged in the Buddhist meditation tradition [in which] one is always seeking to stay open to what's not known, to the unexpected-- in fact to develop a capacity and a taste for the unexpected and the constantly changing nature of experience rather than what's certain. I think most artists and poets are also working that edge."

Why are artists attracted to Buddhism? "To appreciate the practice you have to practice," Kay Larson said. " To appreciate Buddhism, you can catch some of the sensibility by being aware of issues like not clinging to things or ideas, and open yourself to the flow of mind and experience---and that's what artists do anyway. In a way, Buddhism shows them what they're already doing, and gives them a larger frame for it."

What can presenters and viewers of art learn from a Buddhist approach to art? Jordan Simmons participated in Awake partly to help him in working with some of the newer Asian immigrants, the Mien from northern Laos. Some 2500 have settled in the area served by his East Bay Center for Performing Arts. Buddhism is part of their culture, in combination with aspects of Taoism, shamanism and animism. But in the emphasis on the integrity of experiencing art as well as creating it derived from Buddhist meditation, Simmons found a compelling reason for all people to value art. "For the audience what's important is not some status experience but a real experience of the work. And when we teach young people to do art, we are teaching them to value their own experience of life."

For those without access to "Awake" events, there will be two books published by the University of California Press. In the Space of Art: Buddha Mind and the Culture of Now, co-edited by Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, featuring interviews with artists and essays by conference participants, as well as others including Arthur Danto and Stephen Batchelor, will appear in fall 2004. Smile of the Buddha: Influences in Western Art from Monet to the Present by Jacquelynn Baas (Foreword by Robert Thurman), examines Buddhist perspectives within the art of twenty European and American artists. This book will appear in 2005.

The Skills of Peace

THE SKILLS OF PEACE
by William Severini Kowinski

This is my final draft for the article that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine in May 2003. Not all of it appeared, especially the short "sidebars" that follow this main post.

The point of this article is that peace isn't just something that happens, or a matter of luck or virtuousness or violent victories.  To attain peace more consistently at any level requires skills and effort on many levels.  This is an overview of some of the skills being explored, taught and used in the Bay Area in 2003.  Check the end of this article for an update, and continue to the separate sections that were designed as "sidebars" to the main story.

Near the country road at the end of the long driveway in rural Humboldt County leading to the home shared by Betsy Watson and her daughter, Ella, there were two signs, both fashioned from bumper stickers found at a town fair and mounted on wood. The signs faced in opposite directions, so they could be seen when leaving the house and upon returning. They both spelled out the same message: "Peace starts at home."

Elizabeth Watson (known universally as Betsy) is director of the Institute for the Study of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ISADOR) and professor of sociology at Humboldt State University. She has mediated conflicts ranging from neighborhood disputes over pets to controversies arising from more than a dozen timber harvest plans. She has facilitated discussions in Sacramento to get statewide consensus on California's regulations under the federal Clean Water Act. Because mediation is often kept confidential, "my very best ones I can't even admit to being involved in."

On a recent rainy Saturday morning, Betsy held one of the community workshops ISADOR sponsors in addition to its courses and certificate program in mediation. Twenty people from around Humboldt County gathered in an HSU classroom to discuss "Dealing With Difficult People." .They were office workers, teachers, entrepreneurs, social workers and other public employees. There were no international diplomats or world leaders present, and only one antiwar activist( "Her 'difficult people,'" Betsy recalled later, "were warmongers"). But they were all there to learn the skills of peace.

For just as waging war requires knowledge and practice, strategies, concepts and attitudes, so does preventing, managing and resolving conflict peacefully. These skills of peace have little to do with organizing demonstrations or petition drives, though they do bear significantly on how people talk about war. They are the skills required for peace in schools and the workplace, peace in the home, and peace of mind as well as peace on earth.

They are skills based on self-knowledge and insights into interpersonal communication, but they often run counter to deeply bred attitudes about how to handle conflict, and how we regard each other. Yet they are derived from deep human desires and drives that are often denigrated and denied: cooperation, compassion, empathy and connection.

The group assembled that morning came prepared to talk about difficult bosses, clients and coworkers. But Betsy first asked if they thought they themselves were somebody else's difficult people. Many admitted that at times, they were.

Though Betsy' daughter is away at college now (she was approaching adolescence when they made those signs along their driveway), she still uses her parenting experiences to illustrate concepts and techniques in managing conflict.

So to illustrate the power of point of view, she described a mother-daughter conversation on driving late at night. "We went around and around on that one, until finally I copped to the fact that I was less concerned about Ella driving into a redwood tree than what the other drivers on the road were like at that hour. That was a revelation for her, that it wasn't because I didn't trust her driving. But then she pointed out that she could have been the victim of a crazy driver all the years she rode in the car with me driving, and that was absolutely true. It helped us both calm down a little."

Betsy's question and her example both related to understanding how different roles can lead to different perceptions and conflict. For the rest of the day she led the workshop through a series of concepts and techniques, applying them to specific situations the participants wanted to discuss.

Some were about perceptions ("What are your basic assumptions---and what are the assumptions you put on other people without really knowing?"), while others concerned behavior and communication. "There' s nothing wrong with boundaries," she told them, "but they don't have to be made out of barbed wire."

She talked about the crucial role of respect, about separating wants from needs, and she taught the techniques of "naming" (defining the problem) and "reframing" (ways of re-stating the problem that move both parties toward solution.) They learned the "Platinum Rule"---the Golden Rule for a diverse society: "Treat others as they wish to be treated."

Many of these skills also pertain to public discussions, like the community forum on terrorism and impending war in Iraq that Betsy facilitated last fall. "I see the country polarized, especially in terms of foreign affairs and the economy," she said one afternoon in her campus office. "I'm interested in helping people to have these difficult conversations. My business is not to tell people how to think---my business is to teach people how to think well."

Peace starts at home for Betsy Watson, but it doesn't end there. "All of these concepts and techniques are just to make us smarter, and better able to meet challenges, whether they're little challenges like getting along better with your kids or your boss, or big challenges like foreign policy. If we listen carefully to the other person, then it gives us the ability to take their needs as well as our own into consideration and find that third way that works for both of us."

As for issues of war and peace, "people have the right to come down on whichever side they choose, but you have to name what you are doing," she adds. "When you decide to fight in Iraq, you are deciding to send other people's children to kill other people's children. As ugly as Vietnam was, that's a lesson that was brought home to us, every evening with dinner. I remember the week my brother was killed, the television said that only 71 Americans died this week---a low body count."

Peace starts at home, because war ends up there.

The Enemy Within

There are hundreds of peace studies and conflict resolution programs in American universities, and hundreds more around the world. They haven't always gotten a lot of attention or respect.

Edwin Epstein

"Peace and Conflict Studies? A fool's errand, a short conversation. Or, 'isn't that an oxymoron, like business ethics?' We used to get those kinds of responses," says Edwin M. Epstein, current chairman of the program at UC Berkeley.

But he doesn't hear that any more. "Right now what we hear more often is, this is really crucial stuff."

The program grew out of a 1970s course on non-violence taught then and now by Michael Negler, author of "Is There No Other Way," but it was an orphan in the university system until International and Area Studies gave it a home. "Few if any issues in this world are blatantly clear-cut, notwithstanding how sound bites and headlines present them," Epstein said. "You have to know the facts, have some understanding of context and history. Our students enter with passion and we want them to exit with passion. But passion is not enough---you need skills and competencies that make you useful in working towards resolution of difficult issues at all levels of human interaction."

Many similar programs emerged from law schools and social studies as well as international studies, but only a few are hosted by psychology departments. One of these is the conflict resolution program at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, directed by John Ford. Some years ago, he was one of Betsy Watson's mediation students.

John Ford

Because many of Ford's students are training to become organizational development consultants in the increasingly diverse workplaces of California, he stresses the importance of cultural viewpoints, and the psychological concepts that aid in understanding our reactions to difference.

"Some of us begin with the idea that everyone is the same," he explains. "The next step is being aware that some people are different, but we have a tendency to either demonize or romanticize the difference. My hope is to get students to just see and accept the difference, and rather than judge it, to understand how that behavior makes sense from the other person's point of view."

"The goal finally is to be able to empathize with people who have different perspectives-not how you think you would feel, but how they feel-and yet be able to handle that without giving up your sense of identity, or your culture."

To bring these concepts alive, Ford divides one class into three distinct "cultures" for a role-playing exercise, and gives each certain characteristics (one group speaks softly, believes receiving gifts is rude, and is guided by an elder; the second is loud, egalitarian and likes giving gifts, etc.) Their task is to figure out how to share a space in the center of town.

"They have to deal with how to communicate, and usually one or more groups gets offended. In this year's class, the quiet group expressed their unhappiness about how they were treated. In a very short time they get completely invested in these roles. So they all realized they had to address the question of justice."

Tom Singer

Across the Bay in San Francisco, Jungian therapist Dr. Tom Singer takes the influence of culture a step farther. "Jung said each of us have a personal unconscious, and we all share in a collective unconscious. I'm wondering if there is something in between---if in this day and age many of us have a kind of cultural or group unconscious."

" I can read a newspaper now and see five articles on the first two pages that illustrate this. We identify with the injuries of the group we belong to: blacks or whites, men or women, the homeless or the middle class, Americans or Iraqis. Every group feels it's been injured in some way, and each of us can project that sense of making somebody responsible for that injury. Our group is good and injured, and the other is the violating and injuring group."

It isn't that groups aren't really injured or that others aren't really at least partly to blame. It's how irrational, indiscriminate and powerful the emotions are that choke off rational evaluation and communication. "So much of this is reflex, projecting evil onto Saddam or Bush, and seeing oneself as good and virtuous," Singer said. "The classic Jungian prescription is to become more conscious of these mechanisms, but it's very, very difficult, especially in these distressing interactions that are so highly charged."

By not judging people as all good or evil, eventually you can better judge the content of what they say. So besides knowledge, there are skills of communication intended to get beyond these sources of conflict. Betsy Watson likes the work of William Ury, author of "Getting To Yes." John Ford teaches aspects of Sharon Ellison's " non-defensive communication" and Marshall Rosenberg's "nonviolent communication."

"These are foundational skills," John Ford says. "The importance of listening, to give people an opportunity to be heard in a deep way, and to hear without judging them."

Jigsawing for Columbine?

Susan Petersen   Chronicle Photo

Many of John Ford's students at JFKU are mid-career adults, and one of these is Susan Petersen, an elementary public school principal in Concord, in the Mount Diablo Unified School District. Concord is a middle-income suburb with a mix of whites, Latinos and the range of other ethnicities represented in northern California. When Susan became principal last fall she noticed a lot of conflict among fifth graders, the oldest students in the school. Name-calling over ethnicities and home life, exclusion and gossip had resulted in fights and a general undertone of kids constantly being upset with each other.

When Susan assembled the fifth graders in her office in groups of ten to discuss the situation, she had skills derived not only from her current studies with John Ford, but from years of experience as an educator and administrator dealing with issues of communication and conflict through nearly the entire lifecycle, from young kids in daycare to adults in a parent education course. When dealing with the fifth graders, she was particularly mindful of high school, her most recent place of employment.

"I worked with about 400 high school kids as an administrator, on their scheduling and discipline issues," she recalled. "So I was working with teenagers around strategies and skills for dealing with conflict. Now I'm finding in elementary school that a lot of what kids go into high school with is carried from years before."

First she asked the fifth graders what they thought the sources of conflict were, and what could be done about them. Apart from the direct solutions the school could provide, like adding enough playground equipment to go around, the students made themselves part of the solution. They took up the idea one of them suggested and created a series of agreements-a Fifth Grade Pledge. And together with Susan, they instituted a Conflict Forum that met on Friday afternoons to discuss problems and settle disputes.

Susan talked with them about conflict resolution-----"helping kids learn how to identify their own needs, distinguish them from other people's needs, and work to resolve situations so that everybody gets their needs met"---and they took to it eagerly. So much so that they quickly became teachers themselves.

"One Friday I had a few first graders in my office who were having a lot of rough play that had turned into fights on the playground," Susan said. "We were talking when the fifth graders arrived for their Conflict Forum. They sat in the office and listened for awhile, and when I asked them what they thought, they got up and began talking about what they'd learned. One drew a picture of an escalator on the whiteboard, to demonstrate how emotions and conflict can escalate and de-escalate.

They advised the first graders to really pay attention to working out these things now, so that you won't have these problems as you go through school, so that you won't lose friends because you don't know how to work things out, so you don't end up angry and isolated. "

Though she uses different strategies appropriate to elementary school students, Susan approaches conflict resolution as she learned it from her studies and experiences. "Basically it's about acknowledging feelings and needs, accepting that they're not necessarily the same from one person to another, and that there can be agreements made-- -the differences don't have to move us apart, they can bring us together in conversation."

"My feeling is that we need something like conflict resolution in school as a balance, to help kids learn how to work with other people. That was part of the fifth grade pledge-they wanted to walk away from the school feeling really good about how their fifth grade had gone, and how they had worked with each other."

Working with each other is an important tool as well as a desirable outcome in lessening conflict in schools. Petersen is looking into formal programs she might introduce, such as the curriculum developed by the Peace Games organization in Los Angeles and Boston, which fosters skills necessary for cooperation through the experiences of noncompetitive games, followed by discussions and eventually, community service.

Elliot Aronson

Elliot Aronson, writer and Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, helped develop the "jigsaw strategy" a method of organizing students into mutually dependent temporary teams where academic success depends on working together and listening to one another. Programs like the jigsaw and Peace Games nurture empathy, Aronson believes.

"When we develop the ability to understand what another person is going through, it increases the probability that our heart will open to that person," he writes. This makes it "virtually impossible" to maintain racial or ethnic prejudice, or to bully, taunt or humiliate that person. "My guess is that, if the jigsaw strategy had been used in Columbine High School (or in the elementary and middle schools that feed into Columbine), the tragedy could have been avoided and those youngsters would be alive today."

"These kids are aware of the war, of the violence on television generally, including the sarcastic interaction," Susan Petersen observed. " They talk about it, and they talk about the culture they live in, where walking away from conflict is to appear weak. They struggle with that. But they are looking for ways to promote the idea that learning to resolve conflict is really a strong thing to do."

"Kids don't really like to be in conflict," she said. " It's a new notion for some of them that they don't have to be, that life doesn't have to be riddled with conflict all the time. This is not a conversation they're used to having, but they are eager to participate in these discussions. They ask me, 'when can we do this again? We want to talk about the real stuff.'"

Update 2024

The Berkeley Peace and Conflict Studies program appears to be continuing, perhaps under different auspices.  John Ford continues his work in mediation and also teaches, although John F. Kennedy University closed in 2020.  This piece began an interesting correspondence with Elliot Aronson. His book "Nobody Left to Hate" is a classic in this field.  

Betsy Watson is retired from teaching but still active in local politics in Humboldt County, where (full disclosure) I've known her for more than 25 years.  The big update is her daughter Ella Watson.  She went on to become a doctor, joined Doctors Without Borders and, among other things, worked in Liberia to stop the Ebola epidemic--for which she (and her compatriots) were named Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2014.  She was on one of the covers announcing that choice.  Since then (as Ella Watson-Stryker) she's continued as a global health advocate. 

This article only scratches the surface, and efforts in the areas of inner and outer peace continue, though article like this about those efforts still seem pretty rare.  I am heartened however that my phrase "The Skills of Peace" has a certain currency now--for example, here and here. 

More Skills of Peace: What Is It?

What is peace?  I asked the question.  They answered.

"For me world peace and inner peace are closely connected. It's creating a sense of well-being in the world that comes from a realization that we're all connected to one another. It isn't just not making war, or not firing weapons. It has to do with really acknowledging the interconnectness of all things and of all beings, and living with a realization of the importance of that connection, so that if a child dies in Iraq, part of me dies there. We're all part of one another. The absence of peace comes, and war comes, when we make believe that we're not connected and the other person is expendable."
Paul Roy

"Peace has to start with us as individuals. For me peace is holding myself accountable to communicate from a non-defensive base at all times, so that I am living and modeling and working towards resolution, rather than attempting to control or punish other people."
Sharon Ellison


"For me peace is when people trust that we're all conscious that our well-being is interdependent. We can never benefit at one another's expense. To the degree that we have that consciousness, we'll be at peace. We'll trust that other people see that our well being--- as people and with nature-- is one and the same."
Marshall Rosenberg
Non-Violent Communications

"Peace is being able to deal with conflict. As long as we see conflict as negative and peace as good, it's not a useful paradigm. Even in peace there's conflict, and in conflict there is peace. There will always be conflict, so the question is how can we work with conflict to tap into its innate energy for change, growth, insight and new understanding."
John Ford
Conflict Resolution and Mediation, teacher and practitioner

"Peace is a way of being, a preferred mode. You have to live it everyday. It's not something I've ever pulled off completely, but it's part of that ideal self. But you have to work at it."
Betsy Watson

Mediator and teacher


"If you accept that human nature is truly mixed and has pieces of good and bad, real peace is being able to accept equally what's good and bad in oneself in relationship to what's good and bad in another. It wouldn't be eradicating evil but accepting it and one's part in it and the other person's part in it, and coming to some solution. Coming to such a peaceful resolution in personal relationships requires an enormous amount of psychological work, so one can multiply exponentially the work required to find peaceful resolutions at the level of the group psyche which governs the relationships between rival nations."
Dr Tom Singer

Jungian analyst

More Skills of Peace: Language of the Heart

Language of the Heart

Marshall Rosenberg

Nonviolent Communication is a national organization with a global reach.  As developed by its founder Marshall Rosenberg, the NVC method is taught and used in a variety of settings. 

"It's grounded in the premise that the most important thing, when there's a difference, is to connect with what are the underlying needs and get all parties to hear fully each other's needs---the deeper needs---not just the surface strategies," says Miki Kashtan, co-founder of BayNVC headquartered in Oakland. "Once a quality of hearing happens, there can be a solution found by the parties that meets everyone's needs."

But it's more than a different technique. "The language is not the goal. The goal is the connection," she said. "What we are doing is about coming from a different place in the heart."

Teaching and especially using his communications principles has founder Marshall Rosenberg traveling the world. Just before his most recent visit to conduct workshops and a public forum in San Francisco in March, Rosenberg spent 10 days in Hungary, training people from 14 countries, including Serbians and Bosnians, then two days in Senegal working with "people who have been victimized by various wars, and want to know how to help rehabilitate people after they've been tortured or lost their families."

Rosenberg describes his work generally as helping people to translate their language of judging into "a language of what's alive in you---what are you feeling, what are you needing? It's very hard to maintain peaceful relationships with language that turns people into things."

But he also cautions that the mechanisms of language are not the essence. "It's a certain consciousness about what is the good life, which we define as contributing to another's well-being, not getting more than others, or punishing others. We need to create social structures, including an economic system and a judicial system that supports that." To explore how to approach this task, in April Rosenberg assembled visionary authors and activists such as Duane Elgin ("Voluntary Simplicity", Linda Stout ("Bridging the Class Divide"), Shariff Abdulah ("The Power of One") and Michael Lerner (editor of Tikkun) for a Synergy Event in San Francisco.

"Fortunately there are people who have already evolved this consciousness, and they're very hungry for concrete tools like we offer, to live this way, and to create a world that is in harmony with these principles."

Sharon Strand Ellison is a communication consultant based in Oakland who developed a technique she calls Powerful Non-Defensive Communications. "Conversations should have different rules than war," she said.." Instead of conversations that attack and defend, which shut down communication and accelerate conflict, she teaches strategies and techniques for communicating clearly and honestly, without manipulation. "And with this kind of communication, you don't lose control."

"Power struggle is the most pervasive and least recognized addiction on earth... My belief is that if we can begin to communicate without trying to control people, it opens the door to levels of resolution that can start with individuals and become contagious, and extend to families and communities and then on a larger scale."

"Peace has to start with us as individuals. When people from different peace organizations get so angry they're screaming at each other, as I heard from someone recently, I don't see how we can expect world leaders to create world peace."

Update 2024: Although Marshall Rosenberg died in 2015, NVC continues to be active nationally (and internationally) as well as in the Bay Area and elsewhere in California.  Sharon Ellison's book is Taking the War Out of Our Words.  She also has a YouTube video explaining her techniques.

More Skills of Peace: Dialogues

 Dialogues of Peace

If dialogue is to really lead to peace, it must be inclusive in all relevant realms. It must represent the complexity of issues and interests through a diversity of voices and experiences.

That might be the message of the "Dialogues of Peace," organized by Angara Chatterji, professor in the Social and Cultural Anthropology program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

The fourth dialogue so far was held in April at the CIIS campus on Mission Street and included Norman Solomon of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Abdul Jan Mohamed of UC Berkeley, Kurdish Human Rights activist Soraya Serajeddini and representatives of the Middle East Children's Alliance, among others.

The series began in 2001 in response to September 11. "I watched students struggle with it," she recalls, "and I watched other students be targeted."

"We made it very clear that we did not want to have a flashy event that says, 'here are two sides, pro-war and anti-war.' I don't think that there are necessarily only two sides to any issue. It's not enough to say you are for peace. We want to discuss what are the issues of justice that need to be linked to peace."

The emphasis was on exchanging information that reflects the complexity of issues at the center of conflicts in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and the United States. Each dialogue began with songs or prayers, and featured diverse panels of scholars, activists and journalists with intimate knowledge of those regions.

For example, they know the history. "In the present, concerns are taken literally as right or wrong, but they are not seen through the histories that produced them," Angana said. "I keep telling people that if you understand history, you would act from a place where you cannot talk about justice through any form of annihilation. You can't make justice by means of injustice."

Accommodating complexity often means listening to different points of view that emanate from different experiences. "Concerns of justice should dictate how we honor difference. When we are faced with difference we don't silence it or expect it to conform to our expectations of it. We honor what it is, and we force ourselves to change because of it."

"Through the Dialogues for Peace, the commitment is to address injustice and ally with those marginalized, and to support non violent struggles," she wrote in an official announcement. "We seek to build communities of peace, hope and solidarity. We seek to address and give voice to issues that are under represented at CIIS and in the Bay Area. "

Angana Chatterji also works with communities in India, where she was born, to foster social and ecological justice. She is the Director of Research with the Asia Forest Network, and her passionate writings appear in a variety of journals and newspapers.

Update 2024: Angana Chatterji is currently research scholar at the Center for Race and Gender Diversity at the U. of California Berkeley.  In 2008 she founded the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir.

More Skills of Peace: Positive Psychology

 The Power of Positive Feeling

"We know a lot about negative emotions, like anxiety and anger and fear and guilt, shame and embarrassment. We know relatively little if anything at all about compassion and gratitude and love and awe and devotion. The Center has the opportunity to open up new ideas about human nature."

Dacher Keltner is founding director of the Berkeley Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being at UC Berkeley, founded just a year and a half ago to engage in research and sponsor public programs.

"The positive psychology movement got started when the social science got interested in happiness, in the positive feelings individuals have about their lives," he said. "What's unique about our center is our focus on what contributes to the greater good."

In addition to Keltner's focus on love, compassion and awe, Philip Cowan researches healthy families and Stephen Hinshaw healthy peer friendships. The center also sponsors research involving graduate and undergraduate students, some of which looks at how cross-racial bonds are formed and maintained. Their annual symposium in early May centered on equality, including the effects of unprecedented economic inequality on health and happiness.

Another relevant research effort is being conducted by Paul Roy and his students at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, where he is Academic Dean.

"Right after September 11, I started a course just to get students asking the questions I thought we ought to be asking about conflict resolution and peace-building. It's part of a new field that developed in the 1980s called peace psychology."

This year his students (one of whom is an Israeli army veteran) are beginning field research in several areas including how fear affects people in the current political climate. "For instance, when we go to Code Orange, what does that do to people? Do they start thinking about their own future, do they isolate themselves? Does it motivate them to become involved, either in helping the government or helping the peace movement? Do they think about what kinds of resolutions are possible for the conflicts that exist in the world?"

Paul Roy has degrees in clinical psychology, theology and philosophy. His wife, Denise Roy, is a marriage and family therapist who operates the Family Spirit consultancy. Also right after Sept. 11, they were both asked to hold workshops for a number of church groups in San Jose, Palo Alto and around the Bay area.

"We focused on how do you make peace within yourself, how do you make peace in your families and immediate environment, and how do you make peace in the world. Sometimes we taught basic meditation and breathing exercises. We helped them reflect on their relationships, and pay attention to how you create an enemy, how you create an in-group and an out-group, and we tried to help people see that global peace is intimately connected with what you do in your individual life and in your immediate circle."

"We especially have to find a way to converse with one another. What we've seen happening in our country is that those opposed to war are depicted as a kind of enemy to the national agenda. It's also important for the peace movement to be gentle, to not create enemies. We can't say I reject what you say, and I reject you in the process. We have to find a way to stay in dialogue so we can be creative about what we can do."

Update 2024: Dacher Keltner remains a major presence in positive psychology, especially through what appears to be the re-named Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley, which publishes Greater Good Magazine and sponsors his podcast, the Science of Happiness.  

Numb and Numbers

Numb and Numbers
by William Severini Kowinski

(expanded from Daily Kos)

I'm not very good at numbers. (All the math genes in the Severini line went to my cousin Tom.) But I've been thinking about them a lot these past few days. We are so used to seeing huge numbers---$80 billion more for Iraq, $25 million a year for a baseball star---that we judge them only in relation to other huge numbers.

But what really is a billion? Or a trillion? Or even a paltry million?

Everybody's favorite number is, how much do they make? Rueben Mark, CEO of Colgate-Palmolive, got $148 million last year, compared to "only" $75 million for Michael Dell of Dell computers. How does that compare with what you make? With what you spend, or can even conceive of spending? With what you need?

When we get to the sums bandied about concerning corporate and especially government spending applied to public policy questions, then the relative values become even more revealing, and important. But we hardly ever look at numbers that way.

I was inspired to do so by an actor. Not Rob Morrow, the erstwhile Dr. Fleishman who stars in a new police procedural called "Numb3rs." No, it was Sharon Stone.

As many know by now, the actor Sharon Stone attended a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last week. The panelists had been talking about world poverty for an hour or so, when a UN official mentioned that 150,000 African children die of malaria each month, principally because they don't have mosquito nets protecting their beds.

Sharon Stone suddenly stood up, pledged $10,000 to buy bed nets, and challenged others in the audience to pony up. The chair of the panel, Republican House Leader Bill Frist reportedly tried several times to shut her up. But she persisted. And in five minutes, she had raised one million dollars.

There were a couple of even more important number in the Associated Press story about this incident. It said that the nets, pretreated to protect against malaria-carrying mosquitoes, cost $7 each. They last as long as five years.

Now, everyone is fascinated with the idea of raising a million dollars in five minutes. But in politics and public policy, we are also used to thinking of a million dollars as not buying very much. It won't buy you a 30 second ad for very long in very many markets. It bought only 1/40th of an Inaugural celebration this year.

But according to my calculator (which comes from the Dollar Store, and has never before had to work with figures anywhere near this large), one million dollars will buy almost 143,000 bed nets. With volume discount, let's say 150,000.

So in five minutes, Sharon Stone and her partners gave the grim reaper a month off, when it comes to African children and malaria. 150,000 children protected not just for one month but for 60 months, or five years.

Think about ad buys during the campaign. I saw reference to one: for 13 spots on TV stations in 100 markets, nearly $57 million. Four million a spot. For each million, 150,000 lives by buying bed nets in Africa. For $57 million, nearly 32 years of grim reaper vacation for children in Africa dying for lack of these nets. If you look at in terms of numbers of kids times years of protection, it's more like 160 years.

Now let's look at some numbers for the Iraq war. I saw one report that figures the U.S. military spending in Iraq at $1 billion a week. A few days later, an article by George McGovern stated that the U.S. is spending $5 billion a week in Iraq, so that's a billion a day, with weekends off.

In his article, McGovern talked about how that money could be better used: a billion for tsunami relief, a billion for Iraq reconstruction, one for veterans' benefits, one devoted to ending world hunger, the last one to the national debt.

But notice McGovern is still talking about billions. What could Sharon Stone do with a billion? A billion is one thousand times one million. $1 billion would buy one million five hundred thousand mosquito nets. That is very close to the number of African children who die of malaria each year.

I looked up a few other numbers. I didn't note all the sources, but they all seemed reputable and they are all easily found with a Google search. There are 500,000 new cases of childhood blindness each year, 70% to 90% of it in the developing world. 75% of global blindness can be prevented or cured. Less than half the children stricken with blindness survive to adulthood. The average life expectancy is about four years. Others say that because blindness is related to illnesses and poor nutrition, half don't make it beyond one year.

Vitamin A deficiency is a major cause in 70% of those half million children going blind every year. A single dose of Vitamin A costs $0.05 US. I don't know how many doses it takes, but let's say we want to buy a dose a day for all of those half million kids. That's about $10 million a year.

$10 million is 1/100th of what the U.S. spends on military operations in Iraq in one week, or maybe it's closer to in one day.

Vitamin A deficiency as well as other causes are implicated in blindness caused by glaucoma. No one seems to know the number of children affected, but it is a significant proportion of the total. Like other causes of blindness, most cases are in the developing world.

The Himalayan Cataract Project has performed more than 25,000 cataract surgeries to restore sight since 1994. The cost of each surgery, including intraocular lenses, is $12 US.

One million dollars buys more than 83,000 cataract surgeries.

One billion dollars buys 83 million.

I read yesterday that the market is booming for houses costing one million dollars or more. It is possible that some people reading this have a net worth that approaches a million dollars. Maybe a lot more. But thinking about numbers, I tried to figure out what I've made in my lifetime, and my father, and his father. I conclude that the three of us, through roughly the past 75 to 100 years, likely did not make more than a half million dollars combined. But my math is shaky and over that kind of time you probably need to figure it using some sort of constant dollar. So double it, to be safe.

One hundred years of working = 83,000 cataract surgeries=1/150th of the CEO of Colgate's annual salary=1/1000th of what the U.S. spends in Iraq in one day.

No wonder I have trouble with numbers.

Here are a few more, from a forthcoming book by Jeffrey D. Sachs, special advisor to the UN Secretary General on global poverty. To meet the basic needs of all the poor in the world until 2015 (including medical needs) would cost about $80 billion per year. After that, with adequate planning, poverty would be over.

$80 billion is the amount just requested as a supplementary appropriation for military needs in Iraq, for this year.

Sachs figures that not just one country but 22 countries pony up to pay it, so the US contribution would be a fraction of $80 billion.

A committee of 22 wealthy nations has set a target of devoting 0.7% of their annual income of more than twenty trillion dollars (a trillion is one thousand billions) to eradicate poverty. Sachs estimates they can do it with 0.6%, given the rest of the program he outlines.

Now let's return for a moment to the U.S., to California, where the bill for "custodial care" in a Kaiser Permanente hospital is $3,200 a day. That's not counting medicines or treatment, though meals are presumably included. (Which, by the way was not true at least until recently for soldiers wounded in Iraq sent to stateside hospitals; they were billed for meals.)

I saw that room price quoted in a story about a woman who was checked into the psychiatric wing of a Kaiser hospital and refused to leave a week later when told there was nothing wrong with her. She is 84 and says she was kidnapped and lost her place in her rest home. She won't leave the hospital until they find her a new rest home. She's been there a year. Her bill so far is $1.1 million.

100 years of work= not quite one year custodial care in a Kaiser hospital. But of course for the CEO of Colgate, it's maybe three days work.

Health, by the way, correlates with income. The higher, the better, and vice versa. Gee, I wonder why.

Now there's debate on proposals to gut Social Security in order to allow investment schemes, which is upping the ante into beyond the bogglesphere. A modest estimate of the cost, by one of the proponents no less (VP Cheney) is $758 billion initially and then "trillions after that." Trillions? A slightly less conservative estimate is $1 trillion to start, and $3.5 trillion after that. And there are people who think it would cost a lot more than that.

Except that the world doesn't seem to have a lot more than that. And I get the feeling that not even that will stop them.

So what does all this add up to? For me, it's a series of eye-openers. We tend to talk in categories. When we talk about government spending, it's in billions. Baseball player salaries, in millions. Car prices, tens of thousands, etc. And we compare within categories.

To a certain extent, this is reasonable. There are lots of zeroes at the end of a federal budget line, but then there are lots of zeroes at the end of the line of people served, or at the end of prices of each item paid for (like attack helicopters and smart missiles.)

And so when you're talking about hundreds of billions, it seems reasonable that accounting problems would mean that you lose track of nine billion dollars, as has happened in Iraq.

But the ease with which our tongues move from the M word to the B word to the T word can distort reality, and can hide questions of value, as in, what do we value? And what does it really cost?

Personally I can't quite understand how someone can be paid one hundred million a year (100x1000x1000), and someone else, in the same company perhaps, be paid 10x 1000. How do they get away with it?

How do they get away with burning 1000x a million dollars a day (or a week), and a total of some $10 billion going to Halliburton (10x1000x1,000,000) on a war that 60% of the public paying for it doesn't want?

The nuns were probably right about me, that I couldn't buckle down to do arithmetic because I had my head in the clouds. But at this point I have to conclude that I can't hold a candle to the fantasy life of the people who toss these numbers around.  But for the public at large, we've become numb to what these numbers really are.


P.S. a Daily Kos contributor called baba durag added this: Suppose you were born with a billion dollars to your name. And suppose you lived to be 100 years old. If you spent $10,000 every day of your entire life, you would still have almost 3/4 of the money left. And that's if you kept your billion in the basement. Even a modest savings account interest would just about ensure that you could live a full and very rich life and never need to touch the principal, the one billion. Maybe there is no free lunch. But for some people, there are lots of free banquets.

The Library Builders

"There was such a passion in people's memories of that building," recalls Debbie Goodwin, who as Executive Director of the Humboldt Arts Council from 1997 to 2002, supervised the transformation of Eureka's Carnegie library on F Street into the Morris Graves Museum of Art. That passion was important to the success of the "buy a brick" campaign of small donations that convinced large grantmakers that the community supported the effort. Now Interim Director of University Advancement at HSU, Goodwin remembers," Everyone just loved that building. That emotional tie was the common denominator."

Such memories (including those concerning Ralph, the library ghost) are sure to be shared in the coming weeks, as the Humboldt Arts Council kicks off a Centennial Celebration for the Carnegie building, erected in 1904. Music by Gil Cline's trumpet quartet (including a trumpet fanfare composed for the event) and the Midnight Jazztet, plus birthday cake from Ramone's Bakery will highlight the Arts Alive! party at the Morris Graves on Saturday, October 2. Other events include docent-led tours of the Carnegie building, and an exhibit of Peter Palmquist's historical photographs.

The Eureka library was one of 1,681 across America (with nearly 900 more in the British Isles and around the world) built with $56 million donated by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, mostly between the years 1889 to 1923.

Carnegie generally paid only for construction, insisting that local communities pledge financial support to staff and maintain its library, and fill it with books. The libraries had to be open to the public free of charge. These two conditions helped spur the spread of free public libraries, which were relatively rare in the late nineteenth century.

The idea that government should support such institutions was so new that many states had no laws enabling their towns and cities to fund their libraries. Pennsylvania, where Carnegie made his fortune, hastily passed such a law only when Pittsburgh found it couldn't meet Carnegie's conditions for the libraries he promised the city. Eureka was the first city in California to finance a library under this state's enabling legislation, passed in 1878. Carnegie provided $20,000.

After the first few years, Carnegie delegated decision-making powers over the many applications to his secretary, James Bertram. A Scotsman like Carnegie, Bertram became known for his scrupulous attention to detail, and his sometimes scathing letters to petitioners. When the Eureka library asked for funds to expand, Bertram refused, citing the wasted space of a large rotunda, and the extravagance of the glass dome. (Now of course, the rotunda is highly valued as a performance space.) Shortly after Eureka's was built, Carnegie and Bertram began insisting on more uniform design for subsequent libraries, which stressed functional spaces within a sober shell, a style that became known as Carnegie Classical.

Several other communities in the region received Carnegie libraries, and their current disposition reflects the various fates of these buildings across the country, as the library needs of many towns outgrew these facilities, or they became otherwise unsuitable. Built the same year as Eureka's, the Redding library was demolished in 1962. Ferndale's building, opened in 1910, remained a public library. The Carnegie in Ukiah (1914) became a private office. In Willitis (1915) it houses a cable TV office, and the Yreka building (1915) hosts the police department.

Horatio Carnegie

So who was Andrew Carnegie, and why did he become the Johnny Appleseed of American public libraries? From modest though not dire circumstances in Scotland, Carnegie's family emigrated to America in 1848, when Andrew was 13 years old. His life became a living Horatio Alger story: in fact it could have been the template for those tales of a clever boy who with luck and pluck seizes a sudden opportunity to catch the favorable attention of a powerful elder. His virtues recognized and his talents nurtured, he begins his rapid rise to success, eventually leaving his mentor in the dust. Rich and famous, he marries the girl he admires, and rewards his mother's devotion with wealth and the adulation of her former neighbors, when they return in triumph to the place where they were poor. Andrew Carnegie did all that, and more.

Proponents of such models usually fail to mention that such fortune necessarily falls on few. Carnegie's case is even more singular: as perspicacious and capable as he was, Carnegie was in exactly the right place at the right time to ride and guide the tide of American industrial expansion, eventually becoming by some measures the richest man in the world. He was even from the momentarily right ethnic group, favored by fellow Scotsmen in higher places. His first mentor, who took him to Washington to run the railroads for President Lincoln in the Civil War, was even named Scott.

Young Andrew's first break was delivering telegrams to the important businessmen of Pittsburgh, then a frontier town rapidly becoming the financial gateway to the West. (Carnegie, who even as a young adult weighed less than 100 pounds, fancied himself a westerner. According to his autobiography, in his twenties he favored "great heavy boots, loose collar, and general roughness of attire [which]were then peculiar to the West, and in our circle considered manly.") From the telegraph office in nearby Greensburg, he watched the railroad being built, and he found his immediate future in its expansion. The railroad made rapid industrial growth practical, and almost everything Carnegie needed to build his empire, first in iron and then in steel---especially the coal, coke, and immigrant workforce-was available within fifty miles of his first home in America.

He was a multimillionaire before the age of 30 and climaxed his business career at 66 by selling the assets that became the United States Steel Corporation. An industrial pioneer who succeeded by insisting on quality, investing in technology, tightly controlling all aspects of his business and keeping labor costs down, Carnegie then became the proponent of "scientific philanthropy." While believing that progress depends on the unfettered freedom of innovators to pursue riches, he also insisted that they had the responsibility to judiciously devote their wealth to the public good. The same principles and wisdom that guided the accumulation of their wealth should be applied to giving it away.

But in practice, Carnegie's choices of beneficiaries can also be traced to revelatory experiences in his early life. In exchange for free telegraph service, delivery boys got free admission to the fledgling Pittsburgh Theatre, where young Andrew thrilled to performances of Shakespeare and became attracted to classical music and art. Hence, New York's Carnegie Hall, and the premiere arts institution in Pittsburgh, now known simply as The Carnegie (which in Pittsburgh as in Scotland is pronounced "CarNEGie,"), its main complex not far from Carnegie Mellon University.

It should be explained that in those days as perhaps not in ours, aspiration to success meant not only attaining wealth but access to knowledge and the cultivation of taste and discernment. Carnegie's passion for libraries can be traced to two events he notes in his autobiography: the importance to his self-education of books from the collection of a Pittsburgh gentleman who allowed local boys to borrow a book a week, and his first view of another prominent man's private library in Greensburg, which caused him to pledge: "Someday, I'll have a library."

Seldom mentioned in chronicles of Carnegie's giving are the men and women who labored twelve-hour shifts in his mills and mines, the sources of his fortune. They included my paternal great-grandfather, who worked in a Carnegie mine, and grandfather, who contracted black lung disease in those same mines. Their names adorn no bricks in a Carnegie library, but their descendants have often made use of the libraries their labor paid for, sources of their cherished childhood memories.


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TRAFFIC KOANS (Part 1)

by William Severini Kowinski

"A riddle in the form of a paradox," says the American Heritage dictionary, "used in Zen Buddhism as an aid to meditation and a means of gaining intuitive knowledge."

Except for the Zen Buddhism part, this definition of the koan could also be a description of many bumper sticker slogans. The best are funny and pointed, and play with language or some established idea in a paradoxical way. And if you look at them as aids to meditation of a sort, as what might be called "traffic koans," they can also free up the associations and insights of intuitive knowledge.

Many state some sort of a position, and identify the owner of the vehicle as an advocate of ecology, peace, war or making love in Virginia. But the best of them, like the best cartoons, contain those peculiar gaps where laughter and innumerable layers of possible meaning reside.

In some ways, these traffic koans are the new proverbs, adages and folk sayings for an oral culture that doesn't have time to do much talking. Instead of trading wisdom and witticisms on the front porch or in town on market day, we post our remarks on the backs of our cars.

What the best traffic koans tell us is very simple: life is complex. Though our binary, for-or-against, dualistic culture distorts reality by trying to always simplify it into either/or propositions, that's more for the convenience of computerized opinion polling or to create conflict for talk radio and televised shouting matches to hype. We know in our hearty laughter it's not true. Even if we can't always see our way to compromise, we suddenly must make room for complexity.

Apart from oversimplified nostrums that pass for positions, our public discourse is clotted with the compulsively convoluted. Full of abstraction and passive voice, the jargoning drone numbs our brains long before we can extract any meaning. Brevity is the soul of the traffic koan, the poetry of the parked car as well as the bumper- to- bumper road.

As examples I offer the following traffic koans and my meditations on them. I heard or read some before I saw them turned into stickers, but some I actually saw for the first time pasted on a back bumper. I find that they are not only admirably succinct and generate many complex thoughts and feelings, but they state their case about as well as it can be stated


Wherever you go, there you are.

I saw this as a bumper sticker some time between the first time I heard it---spoken by the immortal Buckaroo Banzai (played by Peter Weller) in the cult film, "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai..."---and when it turned up as the title of a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, on mindfulness meditation.

One way to interpret it is, "you can travel far and wide, but when you get to where you're going, the person who is there will still be you." This speaks to travel as the search for novelty, and the fact that any diversion is tempered by your perceptions, habits, likes and dislikes. It suggests one reason that vacations are often more fun to anticipate than experience. You always take your own set of unconscious responses, especially the emotional effects of weighty experiences. We even call it "baggage."

But the baggage isn't only expressed in the suitcases full of clothes you don't need and won't wear, and not even in your hard luck stories or obvious defenses. It's in how you treat the hotel desk clerk, or your anger when the restaurant isn't where your guidebook says it is, and your disappointment when the sunsets aren't perfect. You may think all of that is the fault of the exterior world, but this traffic koan suggests otherwise.

This interpretation applies to any kind of attempted escape. You can "escape to the islands" but you can't escape yourself. You are your inevitable baggage. It doesn't mean you shouldn't go anywhere else, or that you can't enjoy a trip or a vacation. And obviously a change of scene can relax and stimulate us in ways that our ordinary environment usually doesn't. But it's folly to expect we can escape from ourselves. If we did, who would be where we go?

It is in a sense about empathy and the interchangeability of fate. That's the context in the movie when Buckaroo stops the song he and his band are playing to caution a crowd making fun of a tearful woman: "Hey, don't be mean," he says. "We don't have to be mean. Remember, no matter where you go, there you are."


In a slightly different way, "wherever you go, there you are" is also about the paradox of presence. "Wherever you go" can mean traveling far, or near--- or nowhere. That somewhere is where you are---it is the ground of your existence.

There's a play on words in "there you are." As an expression it means, you got it, you understand it, that's the answer. Someone uses it usually when we say something true without realizing it's the truth we're looking for. That's what this koan says about wherever we are. That's the truth of our life, even if we don't realize it.

It's got a definite Zen flavor of "be in the moment-Be Here Now." But it also says to me, this is the place. Why not make this place better? Because that's where you are.


The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth.

This is a very familiar traffic koan, adorning the bumper stickers of the ecologically minded from sea to shining sea. Sometimes attributed to Chief Seattle, it is more likely the work of a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1970s, who wrote a speech to be spoken by an actor playing Chief Seattle. But that mixed provenance turns out to be part of its power.

The paradox of this koan is in different notions of what "belong to" means. The first sentence denies the common idea of our western civilization, that the earth is made up of objects (one of which is land, another is water) that someone can own. "Belong to" means ownership, which means we can do whatever we want with it.

Why doesn't the earth belong to us? Who else could it belong to?
By answering this question, the second statement alters the meaning of "belongs." It isn't saying that we as human beings are possessions, owned and operated by the planet---at least, not literally. We belong to the earth in several profound senses that are all activated in this statement, and how it reverses the terms of the previous one.

We belong to the earth in the sense that we are part of the earth's family or community; the earth is where we belong. We are of the earth, we are dependent on the earth and its life. We belong to the earth, then, in the sense that we are beholden to it, and all it provides us.

We belong to the earth also as its children. Our very substance, as well as the blueprint of our being, emanates from this biosphere in accordance with its local laws.

Taken simply as a statement, this is an eloquent summary of our responsibility to the planet, and the change---the reversal--- in attitude our civilization must make if we and the planet are to survive the cumulative effects of our exploitations.

Taken as a koan, however, and it is a profound statement of the consciousness that is available to replace this now outmoded sense of the earth as our dominion. That this traffic koan was probably composed by a white man trying to express the wisdom of an American Indian culture, is itself a metaphor for the origins of this consciousness.

Much of the time, such a combination is a disaster of well-meaning exploitation or oversimplification and misunderstanding. But in this case it does sum up a conclusion derived from both thousands of years of Native knowledge based on close observation of the natural world and interaction with it, and also from the latest research of western science, especially the biological sciences.

The "web of life" is another phrase from this speech for Chief Seattle, as well as the title of a book by Fritjof Capra expressing in scientific terms the world view represented in this koan. In many ways, at least some of what is called the New Paradigm, and much of what might be called the Native Paradigm, are remarkably similar. Their similarities lead both New and Native paradigms to the conclusion expressed here: according to the most complex information contemporary science has developed, and on the basis of an ancient worldview based on a way of knowledge and a way of life that is largely foreign to western science, it is crucially true that we must treat the earth and humankind as mutually dependent, and our proper attitude is humility.

The rat race is over. The rats won.

In many ways this is my favorite, partly because I saw it as a bumper sticker on a car parked in my neighborhood when I lived in Pittsburgh, and I haven't seen it anywhere again. But I love it also because of the paradox at the heart of it, and the truth that paradox speaks.

"The rat race" is a common expression for our lives in the modern world, as they resemble the lives of laboratory rats running mazes in order to find the cheese, the means to live. There is no other purpose to this race, and the rats are being manipulated for the benefit of scientists testing hypotheses about behavior. There is a sense that the race is competitive and we are rats racing against each other for the same cheese, but basically the idea is that it is a rigorous, demeaning and meaningless activity, and we are forced to do it if we want to live.

In this metaphor, we are the rats. So we might even be happy to hear "the rat race is over," assuming that it's not because we're dead or all the cheese is gone.

But "the rats won" doesn't mean that we've emerged victorious, or overthrown the oppressors. We know instantly that the referent has changed. We are not the rats who won. The term now refers to another common use of the term, as in "you dirty rat." It means "a despicable, sneaky person," especially one who betrays others.

In this context, the winning rats could be the corporate thieves, the stock market manipulators, the connivers and exploiters and manipulators (who tell their workers the company stock that represents their retirement is sound, while they are busy selling theirs) or just the people who reap the lion's share of the benefits of all that otherwise meaningless work.

As a traffic koan, this one is exceptionally rich, and gets richer all the time. Since traffic koans are contemporary and often topical-though sometimes eternally so-new information can add more grist for our meditative mill. For example, a behavioral scientist at UC Davis now questions the results of many animal behavior experiments, because it turns out that the experiments themselves can drive lab rats crazy.

Then there's the possibility that at least some of us have so come to accept the rat race as our necessary reality that a popular motivational book uses it as an implied metaphor. "Who Moved My Cheese?" by Spencer Johnson is a fable designed to teach a lesson about accepting change. The "cheese" is "what you want in life," and "The Maze" is "where you look for what you want-the organization you work in, or the family or community you live in." The book comes with testimonials and admiring blurbs from corporate CEOs and other motivational authors.

Once the rat race was considered at least ruefully. Implied in the metaphor was the idea that running rats through a maze was torture for the rats, but demeaning and insulting to human beings as well as painful. But now it appears that at least some people simply accept the rat race as a metaphorical description of their lives. They accept that we are all the rats, and the best we can do is to be smarter about our relationship to the maze and the cheese. So the rat race may not be over, but it appears that the rats who manipulate it have won.

But this traffic koan is not hopeless. From the first appearances of this metaphor of the rat race in everyday language, it signaled that those of us running it knew very well we were being manipulated, and that knowing this may change the game. The second sentence of this koan, the punch line, provides a rueful laugh of recognition. The whole koan implies despair, yet again it announces that we know exactly what's going on. That knowledge means that though we might be rats in the maze, we also stand outside the race, and see it for what it is. And standing outside in our recognition, we are the rats no longer.



Nature Bats Last

Baseball is a game that combines violence and patience, the slow repeated rituals of the batter getting set in the box, and the pitcher's wind-up, but then comes the wicked hard whip of the bat at the 95 mile an hour fastball unleashed from 90 feet away.

Not unlike the natural world, with its calm sunshine and gently flowing waters, its placid lakes and gentle snowfalls. And then its sudden storms, avalanches, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis.

Baseball proceeds slowly, at its own pace, like the world around us, especially the natural world. It's partly a grind: you sit, you bat, you run, you sit, you field, you sit, inning after inning. And the game can proceed in many ways. You can even forget to keep score.

But the game can change quickly-a catastrophic earthquake of an inning, in which your opponent scores 11 runs on 22 hits that feel like meteorites pummeling you from the sky. Or you can be hit inning after inning and you get further and further behind, like a drought, a dustbowl, a flood, an epidemic. Or you can give up one run here and there, and hardly notice that you're seriously behind.

The home field advantage in most team sports is most often an amorphous psychological edge, having to do with familiarity, territory, and the energy of hometown fans. But in baseball, there is a home field advantage in every game, built into the rules of the game itself. The visiting team can score all its runs at the last minute, but it isn't really the last minute...Say the visitors wake up in the ninth inning six runs behind. They furiously score seven runs. But though it is their last at-bat, the game is not over. The home team bats last, and if they score only two runs in the bottom of the ninth, the game is over and the home team wins.

We can screw around with the earth, thinking that a last minute technological solution will even the score or bring us out ahead after centuries of abuse, pollution, soil degradation, species extinctions. But the game is not over because humans say it is. Nature bats last.

The application to the climate crisis is particularly apt. The longer we wait, the less likely that anything we do will change the outcome. This is a game in which everything is at stake. We face the possibility that the earth as we know it will no longer exist, and humanity will find itself in the loss column.

This traffic koan is one to contemplate while we're stuck in traffic, burning the carbon that could seal our fate. It doesn't exhaust the possibilities (the earth is not an adversary) but it makes its point. It's time to get into the game.

Are You Serious?

You take a slightly different perspective on something that’s current or new, and spin out something meaningful but not terribly serious, with a nice edge of wit. It’s basically a confection, and it’s been the bread and butter of freelance writers for newspapers and magazines since the days of Grub Street.

So I had this idea last year to point out that the only gender-specific Academy Awards were for acting, and ask why this should be so. Not exactly a national security issue, so I thought a light touch was indicated. I wrote a quick little piece but I had thought of it too late for anybody to get it in before the Oscars. So this year I started earlier, rewrote it a bit and sent it to the Chronicle. They weren’t interested, at least not yet. So I did a slightly shorter version and tried the Los Angeles Times, a more logical place for it to appear anyway. They were interested. I went over the first editing on the phone, and in the midst of other distractions I concentrated on fixing problems. Then somebody edited it again, and all the fixes were gone, as well as more of the piece. It was only then that it dawned on me that they didn’t get it that it was supposed to be at least a little bit funny. I guess they take the Oscars pretty seriously down there.

So here is a hybrid of the two versions I sent out. (You can find the version the Times printed here.) Most of what I took out for the Times version had to do with the difference between the Grammys and Oscars, the movie and music businesses, which is I think fairly accurate, but not that amusing. What seems to interest me as a writer is to combine something of a serious point with some wit in its expression. Probably if I stuck to be either serious or funny these things would be easier to get published. Anyway, I think the version the Times printed is funny, mostly because it sounds so serious. It’s especially funny to me, that they didn’t seem to see that it was supposed to be funny in the first place.


Why is there a Best Actress Award?

by William S. Kowinski

As the Academy members mull over their choices among this year's nominees, I pause to ask one perhaps impertinent question about the Best Performance by an Actress categories. It's not about the fine female actors nominated this year---it concerns the categories themselves. My question is, why do they exist?

For after all, there is no award for the best screenplay by a woman writer. Sophia Coppola wasn't nominated as best female director. There will be no award for a Best Picture by a woman producer. Why are there separate acting awards divided by gender?

There doesn't appear to be anything about acting skill that is gender specific. In fact, many women insist on being called actors, and bristle at the designation of "actress" because it is implicitly demeaning, like the term "authoress." A writer is a writer, and an actor is an actor. Aren't these gender designated categories just relics of a less enlightened age?

All of the other Academy Award categories are based on the type of work or the type of film. These are the only categories that aren't. There are no separate categories based on race, ethnicity, religion, age, sexual preference or any other element of diversity. Why not best performance by a Latino in a leading role (apart from the extreme difficulty of coming up with five nominees)? Or best performance by a gay or Lesbian actor playing a character of the same gender and sexual preference, and another for playing a straight person?

It should be noted that women who might ordinarily lobby for equal treatment haven't exactly been burning their SAG cards to protest gender specific awards categories. The reasons aren't hard to figure out. Thanks in part to the prevalence of action pictures with a worldwide audience, fewer women get fewer starring roles, or even substantial supporting roles, than men (or, these days, than special effects creatures.) More male stars have more box office clout. So if there was only a single acting category, women might be in danger of getting a token nomination or two, but how often would they win? Having their own categories means that more women are more likely to get more attention, which helps all women actors.

In the movie business and particularly in the businesses that own the movie business, there are fewer women decision-makers than men, and only a percentage of them will focus at all on making things better for other women. Women actors need this category just to survive.

So the inevitable conclusion is simply this: the best actress award is an affirmative action program. The award redresses contemporary imbalances and historically derived inequalities that otherwise would continue automatically.

Of course, that's not why these categories were created, or even why they are kept. Glamorous and sexy women attract audiences to movies, apart from their acting performances. Audience interest in watching the awards program is increased as well by beautiful women crossing the stage and tearfully thanking their parents and agents while dressed in daring designer clothes. (On the other hand, if there weren't special categories for women actors, the most popular women might need to be paid in ways other than prestige, like in equal money.)

Other movie and television awards shows follow the gender pattern for acting. The Grammy awards however have categories for the music of specific ethnic groups (Native Americans, for instance) and for types of music that are associated with performers and audiences of one race or another. So instead of getting rid of these categories, should new ones be created to reflect other differences and redress imbalance? Separate categories for black actors and actresses, for instance? Just as women aren't agitating for an end to their best performance categories, minorities are by and large not asking for their separate categories. Black actors have chosen to compete without reference to race. So Denzel Washington was not the best black actor, nor was Halle Berry the best black actress. They were the best, period.

Despite the fact that these two were very rare awards, and that black actors have historically faced long odds to even get on the screen at all,it may be that the greater legitimacy of winning an unrestricted award is worth it. Also, minority actors can support each other and work for better opportunities without feeling they are competing against just each other for a separate and probably unequal prize.

The Grammys reflect cultural roots of music, and how recorded music is marketed. Even though at various times there were movies made specifically for black audiences, movies have a very different history in most respects, and an entirely different marketing structure than the music business. These days however there is a marketing distinction between male-oriented action pictures, and movies about intimate relationships, widely known as "chick flicks." The actress categories may serve to recognize this market in particular.

The Oscars have gender specific acting awards today because they've always had them, the press and public like them, and nobody seems to want it any other way.

Still, a new entry in the endless stream of awards shows might try something different and give a single genderless Best Performance award. Besides recognizing equality, and quality regardless of gender, it would have the additional advantage of an awards show that is just that much shorter.