Thanksgiving is tomorrow!

Holidays can be stressful times for those hosting the festivities and those joining the party with lofty expectations. Family time can run the full gamut of relaxation, adventure, laughter and fun to bouts of unexpected misunderstandings. It is the misunderstandings, those times that come unannounced and unanticipated that can wreck havoc with the party.

Albert Sweitzer had a lovely quote about misunderstandings:

"Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate."

Many times the misunderstanding is related to a failure to communicate appropriately. One or the other may have thought they were listening. Thought they understood what had passed between both of the parties involved in the failure to understand. Thought they had explained themselves perfectly in a logical manner, only the end result was really one participant just trying to defend their own point of view? Was one talking when they should have been listening? Was one listening too much and not having an opportunity to explain?

We all need to be understood and listened to, not just heard. Hearing and really listening are two different activities. When we listen so hard that what we have heard is offensive it is time to take a deep breath before responding with some diatribe we wish later we hadn't replied with.

Sometimes coming back with a positive emotional response can diffuse the situation. We humans are all emotional beings and respond positively when our psyches are stroked. We all have gut feelings when misunderstood. we fight back without thinking or we enter a zone detached from the verbal acrobatics. We put up our defenses, we ignore the words hoping they will go away and the attack will stop.

Think about the relationships between members of a family during this holiday. They should be mutually beneficial and not simply relationships of provider and consumer. We need family to survive even when we misunderstand each other. It is important to get over the impasse as fast as possible so it doesn't grow a thick moldy crust that can't be touched. Get over it tomorrow, move on, don't brood or yell if you are involved in any misunderstandings.

When we are joined with each other in mutual actions of eating and drinking....think of the trust and affection, care and responsibility we can retain as members of the human family by taking an extra moment before reacting.

"Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate."

Happy Thanksgiving

the end of the beginning

Within about fifteen minutes of leaving St. Croix on a 45' Africat a devine brown booby with a spectacular yellow beak started following the boat. He was quite magnificent, striking definition between his black head and white chest, a stunningly graceful flyer. He stayed with us the entire trip, swooping across the flybridge and sailing straight out ahead of us, then plunging down to glide along the tops of the waves. He'd disappear for a short while until we thought maybe he had tired of us only to reappear by the flybridge to repeat his performance. He guided us into Charlotte Amalie Harbor, glanced back at us to see if we were following, then when we looked like we knew where we were going he left us to fly back out to sea. A messenger of some sort i thought, he was so beautiful, he had to be.

i sat up top next to the captain and while traveling across the pond he asked me why i was taking a picture of his radar screen. i explained that i liked to take pictures to use in my blog and that i posted every Wednesday. i explained i was trying to save the world, chuckled and said tough job. He said that was noble, better than those not doing anything then he went quiet. He was quiet for a longish bit there then said, "You should title the blog "we are near the end of the beginning." i liked the sound of it and thought OK if i use the picture, i'll use his title.

Look at the picture,(you might have to double click on it to really see it) located on it is a point called the "End". The little boat symbol is where we were when the picture was taken and the "End" was the Yacht Haven marina but only the beginning of a night of great music. "Third World," the reggae band from Jamaica was making an appearance on St. Thomas and we were lucky enough to get invited to go see them.

Plato had this to say about new music...not that reggae is new but you will see where i'm going with this later.

"The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, for styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions. ... The new style, gradually gaining a lodgement, quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs, and from it ... goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning everything."

Today, those on the left who backed President Obama's incredible bid back in 2008 are getting to the end of the beginning. Like Plato said ,for some, President Obama's election is imperiling their whole world view. They are fearful of that which is new and different. They don't like change and fight against it daily. The arrival in the White House by President Obama was not the end of the journey to create change. That is happening now as new laws get passed and the end becomes more of a reality.

Closing Guantanamo, moving Kahlid Sheik Mohammad to NY, moving the health insurance bill through the legislative process, working to get out of Iraq and reconsidering our priorities in Afghanistan, finally announcing a deal with China on clean energy this morning these are all processes that get us to our end.

Closing Guantanamo will end some of the off shoring of detainee's captured in this
mess of our own making. While Mohammad's trial may finally expose some of the machinations behind President Bush's "War on Terror." The US-China deal is important because it will drive world and market behavior, regardless of what happens in congress or Copenhagen. While health insurance for all can only positively affect our economy by making our citizens healthier employees and employers and creating a more robust workforce.

It is only after we accomplish these goals that the real beginning can start.

spirit in architecture

Today i'm thinking of an Architect or builder. Architecture and building could be viewed as the expression of the human place in the world. An architect is a designer of buildings that hold different types of people. The builder the vehicle by which the design reaches fruition. The design begins from a concept relying on a stipulated menu of needs. He or she tries to stay within the guidelines and yet impact the final product with imagination and creativity.

All our buildings express our culture and our place amongst humanity. It is our abode, the place where our spirit enriches our present.

i've been trying to articulate a method that would work for everyone and yet still have room for all the many differences we all have and need. Religion does not have room for those that disagree with the dogma...unless you are willing to "believe" or have "faith". If the dogma is presumed to be accurate you may find yourself questioning that which is not supposed to be questioned. Blind acceptance may not be in the cards and you need another venue. This is my venue for talking about our similarities not our differences.


i found a book i never would have bought if it hadn't appeared on my dining room table. It was waiting to be discovered in a box with a whole lot of other books that were meant to have been taken to a resale shop but hadn't made it as yet. The box had been deposited on the table temporarily while the cleaning out of a car occurred.

Being the sort of person that can never let a box of books go unexplored i delved in, finding a few books for myself and for a friend. i put the rejects back in the box and immediately started to peruse my new gems. The one that caught my imagination is called "Between Silence and Light" Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn.

i had never heard of him but i liked the title and started reading and came across this quote of his.

Now remember this is an Architect.

"All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.

I felt first of all joyous. I felt that which Joy is made of, and realized that Joy itself must have been the impelling force, that which was there before we were there, and that somehow Joy was in every ingredient of our making. When the world was an ooze without any shape or direction, there must have been this force of Joy that prevailed everywhere and that was reaching out to express. And somehow the word Joy became the most unmeasurable word. It was the essence of creativity, the force of creativity. I realized that if I were a painter about to paint a great catastrophe, I could not put the first stroke on canvas without thinking of Joy in doing it. You cannot make a building unless you are joyously engaged.

I would like to feel that I have not forgotten, nor have you as I speak to you, about the stream of Joy which must be felt. Otherwise, you really don't feel anything. If what I say somehow activates that feeling, I would, of course, be terribly pleased and honored." Louis Kahn
Here at humanity squared this author works for a type of unity and joy that, while supporting group identity at various levels, promotes a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole. i find that for many, humanity as a whole is a concept that is not considered even though we are connected through our economic predilections.

Reading Kahn's piece on Joy one can't help but recognize the universality of his expression. Everything we do starts with being joyously engaged. We just don't always think about it in those terms.

And so today's piece is a shorty.

center of effort

Have you ever been sailing? Or spent anytime just feeling the wind as it hits your body? Living in the islands wind is a constant, it blows day and night and when it doesn't blow things feel down right odd.

Wind typically comes from all directions, but here, it mostly blows out of the east. It cools, sends in the cleansing rains, helps birds on their migrations and massages our senses even while we may be standing still. In a boat it propels us forward and in a storm it conjures up all sorts of melee.

Boat builders and sailors use the term center of effort as the thing that quantifies the point on a sail where all the prevailing driving forces of the wind appear to act to move the boat forward.

Swimmers know this spot as the place where they are perfectly buoyant. Where they are at their best in relation to the water and themselves. Sailors find it by tweaking the sails and paying attention. Others have a spot that they refer to as the core of their being, they work on that spot all the time, becoming one with whatever suits them.

i was out birding yesterday morning and kept hearing a sound that reminded me of a rattlesnake. We don't have snakes on this island so i was mystified. It wouldn't go away and i heard it a lot. The wind would blow a little rustling things up but i never could locate the source or identify who was making the rattlesnake sound. It kept intruding on the bird calls asking to be noticed.

i also found a broken birds egg and photographed it for another blog i'm working on. i've seen loads of broken bird eggs on my travels, this is the first time i've ever actually stopped to photograph one.

Searching for information about center of effort i stumbled upon the Emily Dickinson slant rhyme.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.

And thought how interesting. Here it is again, i was looking for Hope yesterday, couldn't find her, but found the poem while looking for wind.

Wind....on Thursday i'm telling a story to a fifth grade class about Aeolus(Keeper of the Winds) who gives Odysseus a bag containing the north, east and south winds so he can sail home to Ithaca safely on the west wind...He almost makes it, he can see Ithaca, and falls asleep, leaving the bag unprotected. While sleeping his sailors cut into the bag thinking Odysseus has been hoarding riches, instead they release the winds and are blown back to where they started..........i decided to look up wind gods and ran across references to a feathered serpent that is found in Aztec, Maya and Hopi religious traditions.

Aha thinks i, didn't i hear a rattlesnake yesterday morning? The search is on.

Quetzalcoatl was one who was revered by the Aztecs and Maya. He was a feathered serpent and was known as a bringer of knowledge and peace. He was also associated with a god of the wind(Ehecatl), to Venus, to the dawn, to merchants, and to arts, crafts and knowledge. He was against human sacrifice and was said to have created the calendar.

i read the whole description, remembering that in my travels through Mexico Quetzalcoatl had fascinated me. For Quetzalcoatl was imbued with a similar return story as that of Jesus. In fact Spanish historians, not Aztecs, had attributed the Aztecs demise to the confusion of thinking Cortes was Quetzalcoatl returned. According to anthropologists this was a fantasy of Cortes and the Spanish, not Moctezuma, who was the Aztec ruler Cortes encountered. Moctezuma never thought Cortes was Quetzalcoatl.

Reading on i came to an entry about the Fifth World and clicked on it to learn more. Its amazing the travels i take trying to research something as simple as wind.

The coming Fifth World (where our present World is presented as the Fourth) is said to arrive following a cycle in nature affecting our entire Solar System, where our Earth births an egg (Mystery Egg, Hidden Egg) and then moves "up" within our system to reach its crowning place. All of the Earth's life is then said to be "raised" to its perfected-eternal form. Some tribes refer to this period of change as "Purification Time." During this period of purification, time is said to change where we must choose between the natural Time we have now upon our Earth (meant for us) and an unnatural time structure which removes us from nature and our opportunity to reach the Fifth World. It is told that everyone will have to choose between the two time frames—one leading to the Fifth World with our Earth, and the other (which will be very alluring, deceiving many) which will remove us from our Earth, taking us to oblivion....Wikipedia

For the Hopi, the end of the fourth world is marked by the arrival of Pahana, or the lost "White Brother." For the Axtecs and Maya Quetzacoatl, for Christians it is the return of Jesus.

For me, my center of effort is to try to exert my time refocusing ourselves away from selfish individualism. To stop waiting for some final redemption or savior. To hammer home that cooperation and non-violence reaps greater rewards for all of us, today, no matter what venue you are practicing it in.

To keep working on this world, the one we live in, the one we can create change in.
Getting blown back to the beginning can happen to all of us. We find our center of effort. Odysseus men made a mistake, it took them longer to get home but they finally made it. We all make mistakes, the key is to re-center, don't panic and take a deep breath. Calming yourself before you act, trying to find that center of effort, may make the difference between further calamity and a successful resolution of the problem. The worlds problems and your problems are here today...they need work today...not tomorrow.

And so i came full circle. A kind of rambling romp. The wind, the rattler, Hope, the poem, the feathered serpent, and the egg.


Break an egg and use the nourishment to help you work on today.