Are you tuning into Nature’s music (part 2 of 2)

The environmentalist, Thomas Berry, sees nature with the eyes and ears of the ancestors. The ancestors were much keener at perceiving the rhythms and undertones of nature and were wise enough to recalibrate their own rhythms with nature—as if listening to a tuning device. Berry writes

Our present Earth is not Earth as it always was and always will be. It is Earth

at a highly developed phase in its continuing emergence. We need to see the

sequence of earthly transformations as so many movements in a musical

composition. In music, the earlier notes are gone when the later notes are

played, but the musical phrase, indeed the entire symphony, needs to be heard

simultaneously. We do not fully understand the opening notes until the later

notes are heard. Each new theme alters the meaning of the earlier themes and

the entire composition. The opening theme resonates throughout all

the later parts of the piece (3). 

That may be why Paul Hawken sees this time as a watershed moment in history.

The heating planet is our commons.

It holds us all. To address and reverse

the climate crisis requires connection

and reciprocity. It calls for moving out of

our comfort zones to find a depth

of courage we may never have known.

Try this the next time you are out in nature—the garden, taking a walk on the beach in the mountains—to listen. Take in the sounds, audible and silent, and sense the rhythms that resonate deep within your being. Listen, truly listen …

Hawken, P. Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation. (NY: Penguin,2021), p. 9.

Bessel van der Kolk What is Trauma?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJfmfkDQb14

Berry, Thomas. “The Gaia Hypothesis: Its Religious Implications,” in The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-first Century (NY: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 107-108.

Are you tuning into Nature’s music? (part 1 of 2)

It seems that no matter what platform you go for information, you are likely to see tracks or courses offered to both general audiences and professionals on “trauma.” Once associated  with extreme cases such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, that affected veterans of war going back as far as Viet Nam war in the sixties, we know better today that it is even more common  given the stresses of ordinary daily life: our jobs, relationships, life and current events and the way trauma is held in the body and continues to evoke similar responses even long past the original event (1).

Where does Mother Earth turn with the stresses and trauma inflicted by human beings over the past decades? This is usually the place we shut down because it is too overwhelming even in the face of climate change events—fires, floods, melting glaciers. Environmentalist Paul Hawken (2021) offers hope in his book Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, a self-regenerative system as a leadership model that would not only reverse the climate crisis in the most compelling, prosperous, and inclusive way but also would result in the regeneration of life in all its manifestations, human and biological (2).

Bessel van der Kolk. What is Trauma? youtube.

Hawken, P. Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation. (NY, NY: Penguin,2021), p. 9.

Happy 150th Birthday Yellowstone Park!

Happy retirement to ranger, Betty Reid Soskin, age 100!

In the 19th century, the USA government depended on expeditions made up of surveyors, photographers and artists to document the vast western reaches of the new nation. Subsequently, Congress got a sense of the country viewing photographs and sketches of the picturesque landscapes. Yet it would be the monumental painting of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone by Hudson River School painter, Thomas Moran (1837‒1926) painted in 1872 that would move Congress to set aside designated public lands (see below).

The result is the nascent National Park System of national treasures for future generations, the first of its kind in the world, signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant. The fledgling new nation likely adopted from First Peoples’ Nations, consciously or unconsciously, the concept of stewardship of the land for future generations.

According to the park’s website, Yellowstone is located at the point of convergence of the Great Plains, Great Basin, and Columbia Plateau where 27 Native American Tribes have historic and modern connections to the land and its resources. For over 10,000 years before Yellowstone became a national park, it was a place where Native Americans lived, hunted, fished, gathered plants, quarried obsidian, and used thermal waters for religious and medicinal purposes.

https://www.nps.gov/yell/getinvolved/150-years-of-yellowstone.htm

In meeting the challenge of climate change, the USA has a longstanding heritage in restoring an emerging attitude grounded in what David Orr (1992) sees as ecoliteracy – the ability to “observe nature with insight resulting in a merger of landscape and mindscape” (pp. 85–87). When you marvel of Yellowstone’s role as one of the last and largest nearly intact natural ecosystems on the planet, its thousands of hydrothermal sites and active geysers, adds to its natural wonder at Yellowstone and any number of the many national parks’ pristine vistas.

We could all do well to follow in the footsteps an inspirational advocate for the parks the behalf of us all–ranger Betty Reid Soskin, who retired yesterday at age 100—thank you Betty!

Thomas Moran Painting Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone completed and displayed to Congress in 1872. Thomas Moran Oil on canvas mounted on aluminum. H 213, W 266.3 cm Department of the Interior Museum. Check the museum website for its reopening to the public and go see this amazing exhibit.

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone completed and displayed to Congress in 1872.
Thomas Moran
Oil on canvas mounted on aluminum. H 213, W 266.3 cmDirect capture

Involving Your Community in Exhibit Planning (2 of 2)

6. Determine project outcomes and effectiveness.
Program planning, implementation and evaluation are all parts of a whole and must be driven by an institution’s vision. This must be done at the beginning of the project development so the project is built around a clear understanding of what the museum wants to achieve and how it will determine success. Because both the baseball and hat exhibitions were history-based, we felt that civic pride was a foremost consideration. We wanted Trentonians, particularly children, to feel proud of their city’s history and know that its past achievements are part of their heritage, whether their families have been in the city for many generations or whether they were newcomers to the city, or even the country.

7. Market and promote your ideas.
Share with everyone you meet information about the project, who is involved with it, where you are in the process and you will reap unexpected rewards. In a conversation with a colleague during a coffee break at a seminar, I shared our idea about the upcoming baseball exhibit. He was very enthusiastic and told me that Cooperstown hosts a symposium every summer and scholars come to present papers on the history of the game. From this came the idea for three-part symposia featuring Negro League ball players, an expert on the Negro Leagues from Ohio, and former player and Trenton native Al Downing from California. Moreover, the daughter-in-law of the man who gave us the idea presented her paper on how minor league ball impacts on a community based on her intern experience with the Oneonta Yankees.

8. The new role of education
A recent museum journal states that “the principle of ‘public responsibility’ guaranteed that American museums would make education one of their principal purposes. The realization of this purpose, however, was not as obvious.” It is up to each one of our institutions to determine how to promote education. Perhaps part of the radical transformation is that people may be our most important collectible. We have studied how to coax objects to tell their stories; perhaps now we may want to shift our focus to the people in our communities to contribute theirs.

9. Be on the alert.
When involving the community, certainly you want to make sure the key people are recognized and thanked appropriately. Yet there will be times that oversights will occur and in the event they do occur deal with it at once. When the mayor made an appearance at the opening reception for “Hats off to Trenton” exhibition, he recognized the two milliners who proposed the exhibition based on their collection but overlooked another local milliner, an African American woman. I immediately approached her friends and posed the idea of a tea in her honor. It turned into a most memorable community event attended by hundreds of people— all wearing hats!10. Expect the Unexpected
Be open to possibilities, as there will be unknowns before, during and after the project. Some outcomes cannot be predicted. When you set out to plan a baseball exhibition to showcase the city’s history of the game, you think boys of summer, even nostalgia. But here’s what impressed one local sportswriter when the exhibition opened in spring, 1995. “Healing,” he wrote, “for the baseball blues, (for it was during the strike of major league baseball). It was during his visit to the exhibition on Trenton baseball that he found his solace— “Heart-stirring” he wrote, “and pure joy….”

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Involving Your Community in Exhibit Planning

The following is adapted from a panel presentation for museum professionals at the American Association of Museums AAM annual meeting in 2001 held in St. Louis, MO. Though written from the perspective of a small museum, The Trenton City Museum NJ, its concepts apply to any museum that needs to tap the resources within its community on how to get started.

1.  Realize that the center of your universe is not the institution, but the community.

One way is to stop focusing on internal issues is to get outside your organization and ask people what they think of it and what they want from it. In planning for the baseball exhibit titled “When Trenton Baseball Roared Like Thunder” the museum sent out a call to the public through the press for baseball memorabilia. The response was overwhelming from the serious collectors with large amounts of memorabilia, families of outstanding players as well as individual collectors. Many of the owners wanted direct involvement in the planning so the museum formed an advisory committee made up of academics, business people, sportswriters and other interested baseball fans.

2. Make a decision to be open.

The first step of reaching out is an inside job. A community can sense an attitude from the institution. In some cases, the community approached us with ideas for projects, such as a hat exhibit reflecting Trenton’s former cottage industry. Whether you go out to the community or the community approaches you, as project facilitator it is strongly recommended that you stay open to possibilities as well as trust in the process.

3. Think locally as well as globally.

While it is essential to know what is going on locally, know also that it can mislead you. Keep up with regional news as well. It was only when a major Philadelphia news channel reported about the construction of the brand new baseball stadium in Trenton that we realized just how newsworthy the topic of baseball in Trenton was. If we had only been informed by the local news, we would not have even considered the baseball exhibition because the local newspapers listed almost daily only the mishaps during the stadium construction  and reflecting public cynicism for the project. (It would fail–taxes would increase to cover the shortfall, etc.) Now in its eighth season, Trenton holds the record for attendance for the entire league the past 7 years.

4. Have an agenda not to have an agenda.

Good planning requires a road map, of course. But make sure to leave space for creative turns. You have a great, innovative idea for a collaborative project. The committee is in place. Enthusiasm is high and everyone is set to get to work. Though it is you that will drive the project and keep it on track, in the early planning allow for the creative process to unfold as it builds successively on the suggestions and talents of those on the planning committee. The baseball advisory was a treasure throve of talent: a graphic designer scanned all the images, produced the outputs and publication design while two academics wrote the grant narrative and edited the proceedings from the symposia which was the museum’s first ever publication. Your motto must be that of Alexandre Ledru-Rollin  “I’ve got to follow them; I am their leader.”

5.  Become adept at collapsing boundaries and at drawing them.

Keep in mind that this entity that we call community is today an organic life form. At times there will be boundaries and pockets of self-identification to establish who is “in the community” and who is not, which is critical to a communal sense of identity. However at other times these can be seen as problematic in a world that seeks to eliminate those boundaries that divide and wound. (Mayeski) At the museum I learned about an important borderless community, the people who were “Trentonians at heart”—children and grandchildren of former Trentonians. Though they grew up in the suburbs, they defined themselves as Trentonians and were eager to contribute.

(to be continued)

Pope Francis’ Ecological Conversion

In a 2020 meeting with a group of French environmental activists, Pope Francis went off script telling them the inside story of his own journey of having an “ecological conversion.” In his meetings and conversations between 2007 and 2015 with several chieftains from different indigenous cultures of the First Peoples of Puerto Maldonado in the Peruvian region of Amazonia, he recounted how his eyes were opened to “the harmony of wisdom.” His conversion was the impetus that led to his writing the acclaimed encyclical “Laudato Si’,” On Care for Our Common Home and that at the urging of the French minister of the environment, Ségolène Royal, he completed his encyclical ahead of the 2015 United Nations–sponsored Paris Conference on Climate Change. Pope Francis also told the activists that he saw on display before him the very “harmony of indigenous wisdom,” that brought him to the realization of the poverty of the “heirs of liberalism and the Enlightenment” in that “we have lost the harmony of the three languages: the language of the head—thinking—the language of the heart—feeling—and the language of the hands—doing.” In a forthcoming post I will give an account of an art historian on how he views nature and art as needs of the mind.

“Pope Francis on the ‘ecological conversion’ that led him to ‘Laudato Si’”. Gerard O’Connell, America, Sept. 3, 2020.

“Laudato Si’” https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html‘Laudato Si’

George Floyd: A Monumental Anniversary

The tragic murder of George Floyd in America a year ago today not only catalyzed a moral revolution that rocked the country but one that reverberated across the entire globe. On the anniversary of Mr. Floyd’s death let us be reminded of a bedrock of the American identity that Abraham Lincoln set forth in his first inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends, though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

As we saw last year it was a defining moment marked by artists and prophets who created impromptu galleries whether walled on temporary restrictive metal fencing as in D.C. or on city streets with their boarded-up storefronts as canvases. The ‘prophets’ pulled from symbolism from ancient wisdom traditions to aid in bridging the past with the present; other artists self-organized into a purposeful collectives making visible powerful images both cohesive in meaning and message.

Author-musician James McBride, who has built a career exploring American culture and identity through storytelling, credits the new Black Lives Matter movement to the youth—black, brown, and white bonded together in a shared purpose—to bring down institutional racism and legal immunity once and for all (2020 Amanpour & Co. interview).

Sidewalk artist-prophets have stirred the community’s collective memory with images of past Civil Rights icons along with memorializing Black Lives Matter martyrs. The young people have seen to the removal of Confederate monuments that McBride admits has been eye-opening for him —heretofore they had gone unnoticed. Investigative journalists B. Palmer and S. F. Wessler in their report titled “Monumental Lies” write how they uncovered the sources of funding on sites such as museums, cemeteries and historic houses in excess of 21 million dollars that came from the federal government—taxpayer money. 

The Ferguson activist, Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson echoes McBride on the crucial importance of being “a voice not just for children, but a voice with children and youth who have organized in so many ways to bring us to what could be a transformative moment.”

Going forward may we listen to the clarion call of our youth to tap what Lincoln aptly described as the “mystic chords of memory [that] will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Only in this way, will we cooperate in the providential design in fulfilling Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream for society’s progress and achievement and together realize “The City on the Hill.”

Revisiting HHDL’s message to NJ College Students

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama playfully deflected attention from his introduction by donning a Princeton University baseball cap before addressing a capacity crowd of mostly co-eds on a sunny Autumn day.   His relaxed posture and conversational tone bespoke that of a caring father unfazed by pressing time schedules. He began his teaching on the development of the heart by reminiscing on his childhood and the early markers on his Buddhist path of spiritual learning and compassion.

As someone who is warm and laughs so readily,  it is not hard to imagine the precocious youngster  he described who at a very early age exerted a strong will. He described  how he would signal his mother while astride her shoulders pulling one or the other pigtail to get her to go in the direction he wanted her to go. Looking back, he realizes that this gentle countenance of his mother was an early marker for compassion that was in sharp contrast to that of his father who having a short fuse was given to stricter discipline. His Holiness saw in his younger self his own predilection to wanting control and having his way—what Buddhists term as attachment, or self-cherishing—and shared antidotes to becoming more “other-cherishing” by growing in compassion through such practices as mediation to bring one to an understanding of a deeper reality that ultimately  lead to peaceful experiences. No matter what his busy life entails, His Holiness shared that he is a constant practitioner even when he is speaking in front of thousands of people. His equanimity is such that he is not the 14^th Dalai Lama, but a member of the human community just as everyone who he encounters in his daily duties. Reflecting on his days as a student, His Holiness said one wish he has now is that he applied himself better, so his advice to the current students is use your time wisely and study. He also spoke of the important mental processes of listening and study, critical thinking and reflection without being dependent on one source-a text or even a teacher—but analyzing many different views  and arriving at a conviction as a result of a firm belief of moral value.  It is this conviction, he emphasized that is extremely important for it is what brings about greater change. After an hour and a half he was still asking for the next question from a stack of index cards submitted by students ahead of time: to the question  “What is the key of happiness?” “Money!”he quipped and then added “sex!”  and guffawed at his own joke on the audience.  The answer was this: to arrive at an inner strength that comes not from self-confidence but truth and honesty, is happiness.

The final question put to him was on the role of the artist and the poet toward a more peaceful existence at which His Holiness acknowledged was an excellent question.

October 28, 2014. HHDL on Princeton University’s motto and issue of racism: https://dalailama.princeton.edu/

Revisiting Tom Friedman’s book [AMERICA] That Used To Be Us

Unpublished blog dated September 2011 is still a prescient warning today:

A recent discussion on museums being in the hospitality business on the American Association of Museums LinkedIn group sent sparks flying.  Yet other current cyberspace hot topics that may pertain to the museum field, either directly or indirectly, provide important crossover perspectives. First, museums collect and preserve the best of the past and Tom Friedman’s about to be released book, That Used To Be Us, reflects upon America’s former  innovator/inventor world role. Also, Forbes magazine ran a two-part article on K-12 education reform contributed by Steve Denning, a management consultant, highlighting lifelong learning;  and, a current Harvard Business Review article touts, of all people—museum curators! 

If the world was flat just a few short years ago, then it has morphed into something entirely different, according to author Tom Friedman in his new book That Used To Be Us— How America Fell Behind in the World it Invented. Less one think this is a maudlin trip down “memory lane,” Friedman insists he just wants to wake up and Americans and get them moving. Maybe Stella lost her groove for good, but Friedman and coauthor, Michael Mandelbaum end their book on an upbeat note and with a charge, hence the rest of the subtitle …and How We Can Come Back. Both authors are foreign affairs specialists: Friedman is columnist for the New York Times, and Mandelbaum, Professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University. The wake up call: don’t wait for the jobs to come back, because they’re not. It will take an idea that will start a small business and hire a few people, replicated over and over in towns and cities across America. Hierarchy, as we have known it, can no longer exist for it is not just leadership that can be the sole source of ideas and innovation—everyone is needed to contribute to the new global knowledge economy. As future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey tells Friedman, the future  isn’t going to be about men and women who are physically fit and follow orders but individuals who are willing to play an integral role in “a values-based group, who can communicate, who are inquisitive, and who have an instinct to collaborate.” Another writer attracting attention is Steve Denning, a management consultant and author who was asked to contribute his thoughts on the single most needed idea to reform K-12 education. In the first of his two-part article for Forbes magazine http://tinyurl.com/4xsgdxe, Denning writes of education’s roots in factory processes for efficiency. “The single most important idea for reform in K-12” for Denning is that “education concerns a change in goal that needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy.” Denning develops his argument thoroughly and provides what the implications would have to be to effect change: the changing roles of parent, teachers, administrators, overhauling tests and shifting the focus from command to conversations, and finally from outputs (factory) to outcomes. In the second part of his article, Denning responds to comments from readers which include those of national educational reformers http://tinyurl.com/3tqjk4e. Another education reform under discussion since the 2008 financial market meltdown is business school curricula and what MBA education lacked in preparing its graduates for the workplace. Obviously, ethical behavior and corporate responsibility are being taken into account. Another is what in addition to financial analysis skills what are ways of producing more creative and innovative thinkers. One approach cutting-edge business schools such as Case Western University, Rotman School in Toronto and others is the addition of design laboratories in their -schools to encourage “design thinking.” The next blog installment is my open-source article of a “case study” from Yuan Dynasty China (1279-1368).

Stop.Hate.For.Profit.Now

Whatever your reading list includes for the Fourth of July weekend or after do not miss Politico’s Nancy Scola’s article “Inside the Ad Boycott That Has Facebook on the Defensive.”

I’m reminded of the oft quoted yet apt Margaret Mead quote Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

In the article, Scola describes the novel coalition of civil rights groups and advocacy partners  who have become the architects of the #StopHateForProfit campaign that many of the boycotting companies have signed onto.

As Scola describes, “the coalition has emerged as perhaps Facebook’s most formidable antagonist, when little else — not Congress, not European regulators, not public declarations by celebrities that they were once and truly deleting their Facebook accounts — has had much effect on how the site operates. And their campaign might offer a blueprint for how activist groups can tackle a modern tech giant: fusing novel pressure tactics with the weight of legacy civil rights groups.”

In fact, with all the daunting challenges facing the global community, it may be just the blueprint to tackle these problems by distilling longing into a world community not just tied to eradicating the pandemic, but also recognizing the marvelous signs of nature’s rebound in such a short span by seeing a noticeable restored environment -such as live fish Venetian canals, seeing the Himalayas for the first time in over 30 years just from the decrease in pollution from less
carbon emissions.

As the activist Rob Hopkins remind us we must do it for our grandchildren, and their grandchildren for the future is now.

07/03/2020 03:15 PM EDT    https://tinyurl.com/ycp6pzgq

Nancy Scola is a reporter covering technology for POLITICO. Follow her on Twitter @nancyscola.

#StopHateForProfit campaign