Occupy the Heart in 2012

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

At a client holiday party last week, talking to a marketing director at the bar and the subject of Occupy Wall Street comes up.

“I’ve been working with a friend to create some Occupy graphics, maybe even sell them and give the money to the movement,” I said to her.

The marketing director responded, “Oh don’t give the money to them, Give the money to the stores in that area that are losing business because of them. Stores in the area are being forced to close down.”

She was angry with the Occupy movement and I didn’t argue with her, because her anger didn’t seem unjustified to me. At the same time though, the opposite might also be happening – some small businesses doing better because of the Occupy attention. Still, being a small business myself, I certainly don’t want Occupy to be hurting anyone in the 99%. So, to me, her anger made sense, but Occupy makes sense to me too. Every established system around us doesn’t seem to be working very well these days and Occupy could possibly encourage us to imagine systems that do work. A “place” to start… and even though many pundits feel it’s not a movement at all, and that is has already been compromised, I’m seeing it in a different way.

My friend, Thomas Alan Berg (author of “Uncle Tom’s Classroom”) a visionary educator, has participated in the San Francisco Occupy and felt that the feeling in the air was much more than political, much more than economic. The only way he could describe it was to say it felt like a kind of connection was everywhere, going far beyond the original purposes of the physical protest.

Tom sounded inspired and happy about it and he got me going too. I began to think what if Occupy is one big thought, being thought of by millions around the world, all at one time. But then, I am one of those people who believes that we live manifestations of thought; that thoughts are electromagnetic “things” and that everyone’s actually counts for something and makes stuff happen. There are plenty of the smartest and well respected scientists and educators who are coming to this conclusion too so laugh as you will, but I am in very good company on this one…

Tom Berg’s description of his experience at Occupy San Francisco inspired me to create this particular graphic, because he expressed the “heart” part of Occupy. Feeling our own heartfelt connection (to each other, to this place we live called earth etc…) is the invisible force of Occupy. Everyone has their own relationship to that; it’s an individual thing. No leaders, no followers. Facilitators, consensus, respecting individuality and differences…sounds too good to be true as a real working system, and I’m sure it’s also messy to manage. But first steps are almost always shaky. Occupy might be helping us see the first social description of a new paradigm and since we have no idea what to really look for if this is REALLY going to be different from what we’ve known before, so it’s too soon to tell. One thing for sure: Monsanto, Big Pharma, Big Media and our Banking systems would like it much better if everyone just shut up so they could continue to monopolize the world as we know it now…in our “best” interests.

Occupy the Heart is a reminder that our feelings are not only significant, they are at the basis of everything we do; our emotions are the human currency we exchange with one another, every day, at our desks, counters, board rooms and these feelings make our lives “better” or “worse”. By paying attention to this fundamental “invisible” part we all have, I think we have a better chance of making a “permanent” difference on the place we (presently) call home, good old planet Earth. It’s not like we have to put differences aside entirely, we have to understand them for what they are finally…a million different expressions of what is really a beautiful and unstoppable heart, the invisible force of the universe. Am I a dreamer? You bet. And all the best minds of any generation are, too.

Love to you all in this season of celebration…more in 2012!

Filed Under: Personal is Political Tagged With: , , ,

Confessions of a Teenage Vegetarian

April 22, 2010 By 1 Comment

earth-from-spaceSome of us were “earthers” from way back but it was so much a way of life for us, a natural attitude, that it became integral to our lives and relatives or friends weren’t much interested in hearing about it. We ate our whole grains quietly in the back of the bus so as not to gather unwanted attention and avoid the inevitable annoying questions about why our lunch was so funny-looking.

I was a young teen when the first Earth Day hit, but even way back then, some of us went out of our way to find recycled paper (which always looked brown), find great vegan food, eat organic or raw, stuff like that. I found a naturopathic doctor when I was 17, after asking some questions in a local health food store. Eating organic was seen as eccentric and no one knew what a naturopathic doctor was either. I remember defending my organic food passion to my boss in 1979, who said (as he ate his hamburger) …”it’s all polluted, you’re fooling yourself, it doesn’t matter”. I didn’t like being the only soy eating girl in the room, and I really did feel alone back then. Everyone just thought I was nuts and I accepted it. But even though they laughed, I didn’t stop eating my soyburgers.

No one makes fun of me now, because, after all, I was right. Tofu is on diner menus and health food stores are hip. I’m really happy to see many of my twenty and thirty-something friends “discover” vegetarianism, talk about the dangers of white flour and white sugar, and praise the benefits of naturopathy, raw foods, juicing, alternative medicine, etc. etc. They get all passionate about it, and righteous, sometimes strangely dogmatic too. I don’t have the heart to tell them this is really old news to many of us quiet revolutionaries who basically grew up on the stuff. I’m thrilled that their bodies, their lives (and possibly our planet) will benefit from this new consciousness they’ve found because the quicker we move away from ham sandwiches and coca cola, the better. (Do Americans still eat this stuff? Did it have to take all these years for people to connect their health to the stuff they put in their mouths every day ?) I guess so.

Earth Day is all about the connections between all of IT and all of us. Now that it’s become hip to care if the packaging is reusable, and school kids are being taught to recycle, I have lived long enough to get to the first plateau you might say, and it does feel much better to have company when I’m eating my escarole. Since I have the added pleasure of having Earth Day as my birthday, I feel like the universe was always winking at me in approval, only I didn’t know it until now. And who cares if some beedie- eyed bald man is making fun of your lunch when the Great Mother herself is giving you the go-ahead ?

Earth Day is a little bit goofy though, if you think about it. Every day is Earth Day. After all, where would we be without her ? Finally, more of us are really thinking about it and that’s really something to celebrate.

Filed Under: Personal is Political Tagged With: , , ,

Women’s History Month and the Two Things My Mother Gave Me

March 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

clare_her_momThere’s a few minutes left to March and it’s been one deadline after another, but I couldn’t let Women’s History Month slip by without noting the greatest female hero I knew first hand, my mom.

Of course I spent the month enjoying whatever public celebrations of great women I could find…the Joan Baez American Masters special on PBS was probably my favorite, since I could re-appreciate her political stamina over a lifetime more than I ever did. Whatta chick!

But I guess my number one female hero would have to be my mom. Everyone called her Millie, though her formal name was Carmela. Carmela Mary Musto before she married my dad.

It would be great to tell you that my mom fought for public justice, ran for senate or started a non-profit organization. I think you would be impressed with her if she did those things. But in her own way, she lived the life of an iconoclast, and I saw her struggle to be herself without the advantage of education or social enlightenment, long before women’s rights were cool. I saw her do what she wanted and face the consequences, no matter what anyone said. I saw her help others without a thought of what she would “get out of it”, and this extended far beyond her family. She saw through people’s facades with an uncomfortable accuracy. And of course, like many Italian American women of her age, she was a great cook! But more than anything, there were two great things she taught me that have become foundations of my life.

Being Different is Just Fine!
Millie  really liked being “different”. In fact, one of the things I remember about her now, was that she encouraged me not to do what everyone else did…one of her famous (and classic) “mom” sayings to me was “so if everyone was jumping off the bridge, does that mean you would jump too?” Maybe this started me off with a certain comfort level to follow my own heart and not someone else’s (though I won’t say it’s not sometimes a lonely road). She was naturally skeptical of what I have learned to call social consciousness: doing, feeling, or going along with what “everyone else is doing”…the mindless march of the masses. Millie was full of her own mind, and certainly marched to her own drummer.

Being Generous is What Life is About
Millie’s generosity was legendary and didn’t seem to have any edges or boundaries to it. When she was in her mid-fifties, she took on the full-time care of two small children, they were three and four years old at the time. Their mom had just died. They were cousins on my dad’s side, not even her side of the family, but my mom took on their care like it was a mission from god. And it probably was. We all lived together and she did everything from breakfast to bedtime, 24/7 with these two beautiful girls; with occasional Sunday breaks when their dad would take them out. I guess I don’t know many women who would take on the care of toddlers at that point in their life, when their own child was almost grown; seems a bit nuts to me when I think about it. Unless the situation was forced on someone, most women would run from this kind of thing. Maybe my mom saw it as her opportunity to really make a difference in the world,  one person at a time. I know it wasn’t easy for her.  And while it’s not like inventing a cure for cancer, this attitude of hers did indeed impact the lives of so many, not to mention those two young girls, now grown with children of their own.

Millie and I argued a LOT, fought like boxers for a championship title and neither of us ever gave in. Like all heroes, she went beyond what was expected, she went where her own heart took her, no matter how unlikely that seemed to be. I still miss her. She’ll always be the first woman who made history in my life and I’ll always be proud to have had the good fortune of being her daughter.

Filed Under: Personal is Political
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