April 2010

Let’s Get On With It

The millennials, the people born between 1980 and 2001, got Barack Obama elected. They turned out in record numbers, and they registered untold numbers of other voters. They grew up with computers, cell phones, and the Internet. They experienced 9/11 together. They have met the dire doomsday warnings of Al Gore and others not with resignation or despair, but with a resounding “Yes, we can!” Last November I spent a week in Jrna, Sweden, teaching social entrepreneurship to 39 millennials from 18 countries. They were participating in an 11-month gap-year program called the International Youth Initiative Program (YIP). Being with these millennials felt like hanging out in a troupe of Cirque du Soleil performers. They were gymnasts and acrobats, dancers and jugglers, musicians, singers, sculptors, painters, writers, and filmmakers. We sang to begin each class. During breaks each morning, a clutch of them jumped into the freezing Baltic Sea. They performed impromptu skits and practiced the Brazilian martial art capoeira. They cheerfully cleaned the classroom and dining room in work crews. Most shared a poem or song in their native language on open-mike night. They looked into each other’s eyes. They cried tears of sadness and joy. They felt and expressed their anger, frustration, and outrage at the state of the world. One day I led them in a guided meditation devised by author Joanna Macy: Imagine yourself 75 years from now, alone in a field of soft green grasses, blue sky,and a gurgling brook nearby. Environmental disaster has been averted and war put to an end. A little girl of 8 or 9 comes skipping across the meadow and comes up to you, asking, “Is it really true that the world almost died from war, disease, and pollution when you were young? How did you keep from worrying all […]

To Reach the Clouds

‘One year after the nightmares of September 11, how good to remember that morning in 1974 when a young man gave New York a gift of astonishing, indelible beauty. How good that he has sat down now to give us this lively and often heart-stopping account of how he achieved his masterpiece’. Paul Auster He claims proudly to have been arrested 500 times for street-juggling and has written a variety of books on his art, but high-wire performer Phillipe Petit’s latest slim volume recounts his biggest and most legendary coup. Back in 1971, after performing clandestine wire-walks on Notre Dame in Paris and Sydney Harbour Bridge, Petit set his sights on the ultimate target – walking between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, 110 stories above the streets of New York. Proceeding without any official permission, for the next three years Petit threw himself eagerly into the preparations, and the book details every step of the way, following his quest as he surrounds himself with a motley crew of volunteers while taking on a challenge that even he admits borders on insanity. Told with the breathless exuberance of a circus ringmaster, the book is divided into almost a hundred short chapters and effectively illustrated with a variety of black-and-white photographs, drawings and blueprints. Going from assembling the necessary equipment to his complex methods of evading security in the towers, Petit injects verve and poetry into his tale, and for every moment that he comes across as arrogant and pretentious, there’s another where the sheer audacity of the scheme carries the story along on a wave of enthusiastic energy. Events finally lead to the high-wire walk itself, written as a vividly expressionistic piece of prose, and the chaotic aftermath where Petit faced the wrath of the New York authorities. […]

At Home

Hello – is anybody home? What does it mean to feel “at home” in this world? I often feel at home when I can laugh with a friend Ð where openness, trust and mutual revelation are like comfortable furniture. Slumber offers a similar experience. But when not asleep, where on Earth am I most at home? The car rumbles off the ferry’s ramp. Migrating southwards, my spirit lifts and starts humming. Like a bird who has to sing. Evening; arriving at the campground. I walk into the forest. A honeydew-fragrant homecoming and a hooting-morepork welcome awaits me. I am expected. Cramped little tent but homely enough. Who cares this hard earth and lack of feather pillow? Sleep comes easily in a beech wood cradle. Dawn at the bach. I wake to the slow, rhythmic beat of waves on a nearby shore and bell-ringing birds in the surrounding bush. Cliche perhaps, yet home is here also – where my youthful heart was formed and where, on the wing of a memory, it happily returns. What allows me to be deeply “at home” in Nature? My feelings alone aren’t enough that popular, pink-marshmallow conception of love which considers it a lush force that does for us what we’re too lazy to do for ourselves! No, feeling is only the morning mood of love; real love is deed. Whom we call God, is Love. I live and move and have my fragile human being in Love. And the nature of God is, in-deed, Nature. So my heart-mind seeks and finds its own nature reflected in the mirror held by divine Nature. The Divine lies entombed in Nature; waiting patiently, silently for my homecoming. And what is my deed of love? To walk in the path of honest thought; to choose as my guide […]

Vegetable Tour Guide

By Elizabeth Alington It’s full-on for Andrew Seager most of the year. From dawn to dusk last Spring, he was busy preparing raised beds, spreading compost, goading the tractor into doing the hard-yard and sowing beans, carrots, radish, basil, and zucchini.  Somewhere along the way he managed to transplant Autumn’s fare of kohlrabi, broccoli and cauliflower seedlings.                If that’s not a week’s-worth of work, on Saturdays he’s manning a stall at the Black Barn FarmersÕ Market in Havelock North, selling the vegetables of his labour. Andrew operates his market garden from a modest, one-hectare property that lies 20 kilometres south of Hastings near Te Hauke. He’s been there now for 16 years, although to begin with, it took a long time to find the right patch on which to put down his roots.  As a schoolboy, growing up near London, and fascinated by the idea of the Antipodes, Andrew longed to go to New Zealand to explore the mountains of the Southern Alps. By his early teens he was saving his pennies; earning pocket money tidying up “old ladies’ gardens”. At 19 and attracted by the idea of community, he left the UK and headed down-under where he chanced upon biodynamics as a method of sustainable food production.  But it was to be some time before biodynamics would become part of his life. First, he had to return to the UK via Asia and Mt.Everest base camp. For the next few years, Andrew explored the world. Like most biodynamic farmers, he was inclined to think “outside the square” – these farmers are not the ones responsible for messing up your favourite fishing river. While working on biodynamic farms and gardens in England and Germany, he was able to attend lectures in economics and […]