Turn off your TV
Leave your house
Know your neighbors
Look up when you are walking
Greet people
Sit on your stoop
Plant flowers
Use your library
Play together
Buy from local merchants
Share what you have
Help a lost dog
Take children to the park
Garden together
Support neighborhood schools
Fix it even if you didn't break it
Have pot lucks
Honor elders
Pick up litter
Read stories aloud
Dance in the street
Talk to the mail carrier
Listen to the birds
Put up a swing
Help carry something heavy
Barter for your goods
Start a tradition
Ask a question
Hire young people for odd jobs
Organize a block party
Bake extra and share
Ask for help when you need it
Open your shades
Sing together
Share your skills
Take back the night
Turn up the music
Turn down the music
Listen before you react to anger
Mediate a conflict
Seek to understand
Learn from new and uncomfortable angles
Know that no one is silent though many are not heard, Work to change this.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
ABC's of Growth
Always adding to illusion
Bombarding all our minds
Complication of the commonplace
Dividing the divine
Erase everything you know
Free it from defined
Grasping only leads to loss
Hold on but without pride
Investigate the sacred
Juxtaposed with the profane
Keeping them in balance
Letting go of all the names
Making peace with the unknown
Never seeking so you can find
Opposition met everyday
Provides a way in which to climb
Question what you know and love
Realizing when your wrong
Stabilize at your center
Try not to stray for long
Under any circumstance
Virtue shows the way to be
We never know whats coming next
You'll have to wait and
Z
Bombarding all our minds
Complication of the commonplace
Dividing the divine
Erase everything you know
Free it from defined
Grasping only leads to loss
Hold on but without pride
Investigate the sacred
Juxtaposed with the profane
Keeping them in balance
Letting go of all the names
Making peace with the unknown
Never seeking so you can find
Opposition met everyday
Provides a way in which to climb
Question what you know and love
Realizing when your wrong
Stabilize at your center
Try not to stray for long
Under any circumstance
Virtue shows the way to be
We never know whats coming next
You'll have to wait and
Z
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
March 30 2011
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, the attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and peculiarities and by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone implicit in the culture of progress and technique impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct every culture that disappears diminishes a possibility of life.
-Octavio Paz (1967)
-Octavio Paz (1967)
Thursday, March 24, 2011
To be dirt is my desire
To be dirt is my desire
To give back to my provider
not to be burned to ashes by fire
or locked in a case of cement and wire
I want to give this body its ultimate wish
to be served up as food on a worms dinner dish
I'll give this body to the roots of plants
who provided theirs for me while mine could still dance
For my body to lay lifeless should incur no expense
I wont need a receipt, paper or plastic for this.
Some would call this foreign or strange
but I see it happening everyday
As dried leaves let go of their limbs
and fall to the ground to be shelter for ants
So too does my dry skin fall
providing minuscule nutrients for the tiny life in the soil
Please don't be scared of my dead body
Focus on the beauty it provides to all that surrounds me
To be dirt is my desire
To give back to my provider
To give back to my provider
not to be burned to ashes by fire
or locked in a case of cement and wire
I want to give this body its ultimate wish
to be served up as food on a worms dinner dish
I'll give this body to the roots of plants
who provided theirs for me while mine could still dance
For my body to lay lifeless should incur no expense
I wont need a receipt, paper or plastic for this.
Some would call this foreign or strange
but I see it happening everyday
As dried leaves let go of their limbs
and fall to the ground to be shelter for ants
So too does my dry skin fall
providing minuscule nutrients for the tiny life in the soil
Please don't be scared of my dead body
Focus on the beauty it provides to all that surrounds me
To be dirt is my desire
To give back to my provider
Monday, January 10, 2011
Long time reader, First time Writer
I'd like to share with you something interesting that happened to me recently.
I awoke from as restless night alone not long ago to do my necessary business and hopefully return to sleep. However upon my return to a bed comfortably sized for two, yet slightly lonely for one, I found myself still pondering the day and I decided that since my wheels wouldn't stop turning I'd take some time to write some stuff down. Several people had recently encouraged me lately to "write it down" and besides I had already done a lot of reading before I went to bed the first time. I thought that writing might bring me the same sort of relaxing calm feeling that reading usually gives me, I imagined myself asleep in no time.
Writing for me up to this point had always been a sort of chore, an apology, a list, a short message and on the most annoying of occasions, a report for school or work. Something was different about tonight, something overflowed. A switch covered in cobwebs in a dark corner of a room rarely visited was flipped. I WROTE! I wrote to no one and everyone at the same time I wrote to myself but from a perspective outside of myself, I just wrote. Somehow I had freed myself from the box I had been placed in as a young child in school, I didn't have to have a thesis statement or a subject or a plot at all, I could just write! I began to whip my pen rapidly describing the occurrences of the previous day and my thoughts about each of them in what I thought was such brilliant wording if I did say so myself. It was wonderful! I couldn't believe I had never done this before. I had heard about it, people had suggested I do it, and I had spent countless hours fumbling through some of the greatest works of it ever created yet somehow it had eluded me, I had never tried it for myself. Until now. I continued writing until my wrist became sore and the indentation my middle finger where I rest my pen began to ache from the flurry. So I took a break. I felt even more awake than when I had started and now my mind was racing. I decided to return to my book, it was the middle of the night, and I did have a short list of things to do tomorrow.
I opened my book looking for that familiar relaxing feeling and I read...I READ! again I felt I had opened a door I had never been through before. I felt I was really reading for the first time. I realized that this was not just a bank of knowledge to take from in order to better understand my world. It is a work of art! A beautiful thing, a sharing of someones soul through words, an expression of what it is to be human. So I turned back over again, grabbed my pen and paper and began to write about this very experience.
In reading this I expect that the people that understand what I'm trying to say will be writers and readers themselves and they may not understand how I could have gone for so long reading as many books as I have and never writing, or much less understanding what writing is. To help explain myself I'd like to ask, How many of us live our lives like that everyday?
How many of us eat but rarely cook, sing but never dance, teach without also learning, speak but forget to listen.
I'm so glad to have finally discovered writing even after such a long existence without it, and I'm glad it worked out this way and provided me an opportunity to examine my own life and the balances that exist within it.
<3
Avery
I awoke from as restless night alone not long ago to do my necessary business and hopefully return to sleep. However upon my return to a bed comfortably sized for two, yet slightly lonely for one, I found myself still pondering the day and I decided that since my wheels wouldn't stop turning I'd take some time to write some stuff down. Several people had recently encouraged me lately to "write it down" and besides I had already done a lot of reading before I went to bed the first time. I thought that writing might bring me the same sort of relaxing calm feeling that reading usually gives me, I imagined myself asleep in no time.
Writing for me up to this point had always been a sort of chore, an apology, a list, a short message and on the most annoying of occasions, a report for school or work. Something was different about tonight, something overflowed. A switch covered in cobwebs in a dark corner of a room rarely visited was flipped. I WROTE! I wrote to no one and everyone at the same time I wrote to myself but from a perspective outside of myself, I just wrote. Somehow I had freed myself from the box I had been placed in as a young child in school, I didn't have to have a thesis statement or a subject or a plot at all, I could just write! I began to whip my pen rapidly describing the occurrences of the previous day and my thoughts about each of them in what I thought was such brilliant wording if I did say so myself. It was wonderful! I couldn't believe I had never done this before. I had heard about it, people had suggested I do it, and I had spent countless hours fumbling through some of the greatest works of it ever created yet somehow it had eluded me, I had never tried it for myself. Until now. I continued writing until my wrist became sore and the indentation my middle finger where I rest my pen began to ache from the flurry. So I took a break. I felt even more awake than when I had started and now my mind was racing. I decided to return to my book, it was the middle of the night, and I did have a short list of things to do tomorrow.
I opened my book looking for that familiar relaxing feeling and I read...I READ! again I felt I had opened a door I had never been through before. I felt I was really reading for the first time. I realized that this was not just a bank of knowledge to take from in order to better understand my world. It is a work of art! A beautiful thing, a sharing of someones soul through words, an expression of what it is to be human. So I turned back over again, grabbed my pen and paper and began to write about this very experience.
In reading this I expect that the people that understand what I'm trying to say will be writers and readers themselves and they may not understand how I could have gone for so long reading as many books as I have and never writing, or much less understanding what writing is. To help explain myself I'd like to ask, How many of us live our lives like that everyday?
How many of us eat but rarely cook, sing but never dance, teach without also learning, speak but forget to listen.
I'm so glad to have finally discovered writing even after such a long existence without it, and I'm glad it worked out this way and provided me an opportunity to examine my own life and the balances that exist within it.
<3
Avery
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
A year on the Big Island
Its been a while since I updated here. Things have been great! Still working in Hawaii at the National Park, learning tons of stuff and meeting great people. My 6 month internship turned into a real job and now I'll be on the big island at least until May 2010, possibly longer and I'm really thankful for everyday I get to spend here, it's really an amazing place. So if you have some free time come out and see me for a while.
I didn't take any of these pictures, but thanks to those who did. just thought I'd post something in case any of the anyone wants to see what I've been up to.
Thanksgiving with everyone at park housing
walking in volcano ( where I live )
snorkeling at kapoho
stopping and standing
Summit of Mauna Kea
retrieving some coconuts at Halape
I had a little phase where I was trying to be awkward in every picture i was in...
The HAVO gang at Salsa dancing lessons
Sunset over Hilo Bay
Halape
I didn't take any of these pictures, but thanks to those who did. just thought I'd post something in case any of the anyone wants to see what I've been up to.
Thanksgiving with everyone at park housing
walking in volcano ( where I live )
snorkeling at kapoho
stopping and standing
Summit of Mauna Kea
retrieving some coconuts at Halape
I had a little phase where I was trying to be awkward in every picture i was in...
The HAVO gang at Salsa dancing lessons
Sunset over Hilo Bay
Halape
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