Wisdom

If it's mentors we're nominating, I think I'd be about the last picked. Not the last probably, because I certainly never want to hurt anyone. It's not as if I don't have anything to share. Mentors are supposed to be trusted counselors to the inexperienced, and for what it's worth I've been experienced. Oh wait, maybe that's a disqualification for being a mentor? Anyhow,the main reason I'd be so far down on the list is I lack a certain wisdom. Wisdom, it seems is not only knowing what is right and and true, but also being able to put an action to it. That's the part, the wisdom, I lack.

Among the blogs I read are several that pursue the subject of peak oil from one direction or another. Most observers concerned about the ramifications of being on the downside of Hubbert's peak also seem to be quite hep to the consequences of global climate change too. For my part I'm convinced of both, but sometimes reading what I do gives me a big headache, and other times heartache. What I really want to hear is that everything is going to be alright, but I think otherwise.

Dave Pollard has a post up What Happens Nest: A Timeline for Civilizational Collapse. Here's a snippet:

A number of readers have asked me for an "elevator speech" that describes how I think our civilization will collapse by the end of this century. Being more of a "picture" person I decided to try to answer that question graphically. The result is shown above.

Go there if you think you can stomach it. It's a compact post which lays out the predicament we find ourselves. My usual response to articles like Pollard's, although I substantially agree with them, is paralysis. What am I to do?

When I start writing blog posts, I have a general idea for the direction they'll take, but the post almost never seem to go that way, or at least travel a straight path in that direction. The inspiration for this post was the delight I felt reading an email from a young Ugandan lad with whom I'm supposed to be in a mentoring relationship. So far, mostly it seems we talk past each other. But in this email he told me not to forget to include a poem for him. I don't write poems, but I had been including poems written by real poets in previous emails. To get feedback that he thought this a tradition worth keeping up pleased me. I enjoy searching for poems online and selecting something I like and think he might too. In short I felt sense of gratitude for how, even though it's hard to point to any real practical gain in the relationship, his presence enriches my life.

I started out saying I'd be among the last chosen to be a mentor, but in reality I was invited to take part. I participate in a social network called Ned and I think that the page about the Butterfly Project can be read by anyone. The point is that it's not only the relationship with the student I'm paired with that's gratifying, but also the online relationship with other students and people interested in the project.

So, this post began with the idea of convincing others to consider mentoring a young person. And I certainly wanted to link to a very dynamic set of Web pages at Tutor/Mentor Connection.

Well, then my mind started to wander. Oh and the tendency for my mind to wander is yet another reason I'd rank myself low on the list of possible mentors. A certain degree of concentration is necessary and negative examples really are never as effective as positive ones. I hit upon the notion of experience in defining what a mentor is supposed to be. From there I went to Youtube and watched multiple renditions of Are You Experienced. In the background for trying to write a convincing post is this gnawing feeling of paralysis in the face of apocalyptic dread. The sense of purpose the young students in the project have is quite the antithesis of this feeling. They want advice about how to proceed with tangible projects, and the gratitude I feel for their optimism and determination makes me want to be sure the advice is good.

One thing even a little exposure to teens quickly assures is they can smell a phony in a heartbeat. That's why "Do as I say not as I do" never succeeds as a strategy. Of course there is something quite real about apprentice relationships. The Cynefin Framework is a simple model to describe situations. It's really quite simple, there are: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic situations. Apprentice relationships are especially good for complicated situations where there are best practices to apply. Most trade involve very evolved sets of skills, the trades are complicated and it takes time and concentration to master them. I think when people think about mentoring relationships we most often think of the transmission of best practices. But so many of the pressing problems of today seem complex or even chaotic. While students might not really be thinking outright about complexity, really it's simpler when someone tells them what to do, in the face of complexity thinking for themselves is going to be more useful in the long run.

I neglect this blog. Part of it is that I can't imagine why anyone would read posts that start out going in one direction but end up meandering all over the place. The simple solution to that problem would be for me to stop doing that. Alas, I wish I would, but I'm not sure I can. It's also a relief not to imagine that I actually can convince anyone of anything, even if I seem to start from that premise. The blog started with the premise of convincing people to consider ways they could be of service to people in Africa, especially online. Over the years of this blog, I've certainly questioned the wisdom of this premise, but never questioned the value of the friendships I've made. I don't write much about my contacts in Uganda because often the conversations are private. It's one thing for me to tell about myself, but quite another to tell about someone else.

I think online collaboration is useful and rewarding. I also believe I've got to be more serious about making more in person collaborations. What my readers think, and hope to do, is for them to discover; although I have a keen interest in hearing about it. My sense about the complex and chaotic situations we all face today is there are no silver bullets, certainly not one big and simple fix. Doing everything we're suppose to is what got us in the fix we're in, so doing more of it even more earnestly isn't going to get us out of it. The best approaches, if they come along at all, won't come from the center.

Apart from the students in the Butterfly project my interlocutors in Uganda aren't so young, but they are younger than I am. Everything we've done together has been to try to create something good with all sorts of attendant concern that maybe it's not so good at all. There's little money, there's ordinary problems on the ground, sickness and health, progress and setback, and constant reminders of how vast the territory of my ignorance really is. I suspect my relationship with the Butterfly project will be more of the same.

I linked to the Tutor/Mentor site because there are so many really thoughtful articles there. Most people when they're thinking about collaborating will think closer to home than Africa. I know of no better site than the Tutor/Mentor Connection to find out more about collaborating with young people regardless of where you are. At the site are hundreds of pages which plainly explain many types of relationships. And you won't go far before discovering that the Tutor/Mentor Connection has a distinctively wise approach. It's much too simple, yet I'm tempted to say that the key ingredient is the importance of relationships. All relationships don't resolve into us and them, indeed the best relationships begin and end as we. Along the way there is good we can create with others, even if at the end there's no real escaping our predicament.

The photo is of a fungus growing under a butternut tree a few weeks ago. It looks like a brain don't you think?

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

On Sunday I went with my dad to a concert performance by Jean-Luc Ponty at Hartwood Acres, a county park. The free concerts at Hartwood are joyful occasions with picnicking, children and dogs. Along with friends we had good food and the weather was cool. What a great band too. Ponty's remarks about most the most recent album, The Acatama Experience:

The Acatama Experience was conceived as a musical journey starting with a Paris street ambiance (Intro) followed by 13 songs, taking us through different lands, through a variety of impressions and emotions, through the past and present. This is also the first album that I produced in such 'on and off' manner, between January 2006 and February 2007. During that time period I also traveled and performed with my band on different continents, from South America to Europe, from Russia to Venezuela, from the U.S.A. to India, returning to this album project each time with fresh ears and new insight.

The band : percussionist Moustapha Cisse, drummer Theierry Arpino, bassist Guy Nsangue Akwa, and keyboardist William Lecomte blend their conservatory training with West African rhythms into brilliant music.

It turns out there's a Summer of Love connection with Jean-Luc Ponty in that he was first introduced to American musical audiences at the 1967 Monterey Jazz Festival. The Monterey Pop Festival, as can be seen by the image of Tom Wilkes memorable poster snatched from the Wikipedia article, was in June around the time of the Summer Solstice. The Monterey Jazz Festival was held on the same fairgrounds in September around the time of the Autumnal Solstice.

Time flies and it is hard to keep everything straight in mind. Thinking about music for my own Summer of Love anniversary party I decided to make a mix tape. Yes a cassette tape. Most of the little music I own is on cassette, at least music that dates back to the sixties. Mixing musical genres is an art, and also my collection of sixties music is predominately Soul anyway. That's appropriate because while in 1967 I did listen to The Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow album, and The Mamas and Papas album, and Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme--all of them my brother's albums--mostly what I heard was Soul music on the car radio. It took me a while longer to discover the music of Monterey Pop and Monterey Jazz festivals.

I chatted with a young musician, FredAlfred online recently and when it came to my age he asked: "Were you a hippie?" By this account, The Death of Hippie occurred in October of 1967. But you only have to read the document to understand the reality isn't quite as neat as the report suggests. The old joke follows: "If you remember the sixties, you weren't there." No, I was too young to be a hippie in 1967, but I still think it was the beginning of something. If celebrating the Summer of Love is worth it, then that "something" that was beginning has to be fleshed out a bit.

An obstacle to fleshing this out from my personal experience is one way of looking at it is that it's the beginning of one blunder after another. I not alone in seeing my own blunders and those of a wide swath of my generation, but it seems there's a minority of us who rather not repudiate the zeitgeist of the time.

Darn it! I never can seem to get to the point of anything. The reason I started with this whole Summer of Love thread was as a way of explaining a long lapse in posting to Bazungu Bucks. The reasons, as best I can tell, have to do with an upwelling of despair about present events. The reality of my local and personal circumstances are quite pleasant. Oh that so many more of us were so blessed! The rub is that the systems which serve my comfort and well-being contribute substantially to the misery of many people around the world. And these systems eat the world's resources in ways that cannot sustain even my local conditions. That's something my generation figured out long ago when we were young, but rather fully put that "inconvenient truth" out of our minds as we "grew-up."

Al Gore, an elder voice of our generation, keeps reminding us that we ignore inconvenient truths at our peril. He gets a lot of laughs, but keeps--it seems quite patiently--to remind us of the point. He penned an Op-Ed in Sunday's New York Times, Moving Beyond Kyoto.

Back in April, I was working hard in my garden. I had also been wondering how to begin local conversations about the the state of things and what we could do about it. Oh and I see by this post at Hats For Health I've been thinking about the Summer of Love for a while. In April, most probably April 29th, shovel in hand, the enormity of the challenge which global climate change hit me like a 2 X 4 to the head. The previous evening I'd read Alex Steffen's review of paleontologist Peter Ward's book, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future. Steffen quotes from the book:

In other words, despite what some conservative pundits have written, you might not want to vacation in an extreme greenhouse world, after all. Forget "breeding couples" camping out in the Arctic, we may not have flowering plants or any but the toughest insects left (the cockroaches from my first apartment will almost certainly make it).

And in my garden with multitudes of flowering plants around me, imagining a world without them filled me with grief.

Jim Kunstler minces few words about "the Castor-and-Pollux of Clusterfuck Nation, Global Warming and Peak Oil." The hue and cry "We want solutions! scares him. He makes the point:

let's stop talking about making better cars and start talking about occupying the landscape differently -- which we're going to have to do anyway.

What's really depressing to me is a famous observation ofUpton Sinclair :

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

While I think Kunstler is exactly right that we really must begin talking about "occupying the land differently," I find the talk about solutions reassuring, at least so far as it seems an improvement over shear and utter denial. It's not at all easy to cast a cold eye upon what our livelihoods depend.

No, my generation is no longer young. Yes, looking back over my years so many things that seemed like good ideas at the time, certainly weren't very good. Maybe in a long line of foolishness, the idea of commemorating the Summer of Love provides a glimmer of hope. Because once my generation earnestly wanted to expand our minds to imagine a better way of being. We were hardly imaginative enough. But we took a step in the right direction.

Gore's editorial highlights LiveEarth twenty four hours of music in concert across seven continents on 7.7.07. No doubt the effort seems a bit besides the point to Kunstler and others with it's call "to be part of the solution." But we've all got to start some place if we are indeed going to begin to occupy the land differently.

Central to the idea of Bazungu Bucks is the idea that people outside Africa can be of service to African people. I don't believe we can be of much service unless we alter first our thinking about how we live and ultimately begin changing how we live. We, people around the world, are bound together by this existential challenge of energy descent and global warming. Much of what we in the Global North think we know is profoundly wrong. And in so many ways undertaking the the challenges of the poorest in the world provides the essential keys to our own survival.