Amazing Things I Have Learned in the Middle of The Night

One: "knitting" blogs come in all shapes and sizes. My new favorite one, I Live on a Farm, has a special pattern under "charity knitting" for a shopping bag in the exact dimensions of a traditional plastic shopping bag. For what charity? Mother Earth. Shh. You might get one for Christmas.

Two: my brother's friends are cooler than I expected. One in particular, Thelka, is pregnant with girl number one in Seattle. She is married to a former Microsoft man who, when my husband and I first met him, handed us a card with a gmail.com email address on it. It figures he doesn't work for Microsoft now ... who could last there as a vegan?

Anyway, I never knew what Thelka did for work until a few nights ago when I was browsing the internet at the wrong hour to be awake. She, too, is a blogger. She writes about personal empowerment, goal-setting, and time management. Her insights are particularly useful ... check her out.

On Writing

Stephen King's book On Writing remains unread on my shelf. Many people have told me to read it. After my latest read (that I am in the midst of), I can honestly say that the next time someone asks me what book they should read about writing, I will say:

"You know, I think its a toss up. First, you should read Strunk and White's Elements of Style and then you should read Linda Lear's Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature."

I am enraptured by this biography of Carson, completely. Carson--as a writer--took copious notes about herself, her surroundings, and those closest to her. Lear weaves together letters, journal entries, articles, and book content from Carson and others to give a full portrait of a writer, turned book-learned scientist with a flare for choosing too complicated hands-on research projects, turned government-employed technical writer, turned nature writer extraordinaire. The Sea Around Us has just been published ... and I can't wait to see how she gets on to writing her other works and how she finds herself a witness at a congressional hearing.

This work of Carson's in particular has special meaning for me. My mother read The Sea Around us when she was young, studied Marine Botany in college, and decided to sign up in the midst of her degree for a new sail training and oceanography program that included a voyage to Jamaica. The captain for the leg home to the states was Dr. George Nichols. Ann Ratcliff, years later, became my mom.

What fascinates me most about this book, besides its clear role in the creation of me, is that Carson wrote it because she deeply wanted it to exist. Our environmental work should always carry with it that commitment: I see this void; I want to fill it; I need to solicit all the help I can muster to make it happen. Carson's help came in the form of researchers, primary literature and reports, her family, her friendships, and, finally, the land, coast, and ocean that peaked her child-like curiosity.

May we all find something that makes us--at our core--so excited to be alive.

My life as a community organizer

Realistically, there is no formal training required to become a community organizer. I have found myself in this role at the Friends of the Middlesex Fells Reservation. How did this happen?

In 2009, I helped to start a community lecture series on topics of natural and cultural history. I wanted to learn more about the Fells myself and I figured that if we invited people out to free lectures, they'd come. After all, I wanted to go. I polled the public online and over half (about 60+ people) said they would be interested in coming to such events. After that, it took one meeting between myself, our volunteer hike leaders, and my organization's executives to decide that lectures would be cool ... now, eight events later over 150 people have attended these programs.

I believe this to be a thinly-veiled example of Lappé's living democracy. Participating in free education is rightly outside of election and market forces. Although the events take place in government buildings (DCR-managed state property), they are set-up, broken-down, and performed by individuals who are dedicating their unpaid work time to the cause of free environmental programming, as are those leading our hikes. I have to admit that having facilitated an event series where 10-40 people reliably show up, no matter the topic, is a personally powerful experience. I didn't make it happen; we made it happen. We lived, and continue to live, the democratic process and made possible these experiences of socializing over science and environmental history. I learned, more deeply, that education is a key to fostering deep environmental consideration. Community organizing is my new job; unpaid, but incredibly real.

Community-building as a Process of End Products

I have this theory, which, lucky for me, is a focus of Frances Moore Lappé's book Getting a Grip. Our theory is that the solution is community-building. The solution to what? Everything.

"Our planet's survival therefore depends on whether we can make the break--whether we can affirm or not, as I've stressed, the goodness of human nature but the richness in human nature. Nature, as it turns out, has equipped us with just what we need to make this great turning: our hard-wired needs and capacities for community bonding, for meaning and efficacy beyond day-to-day survival, for fairness." (p. 132)

The more I feel a connection to my community, the better a citizen I become, the more aware I am of other people; of physical, of intellectual, and of mental spaces; of concrete ecological processes. Participating in making connections with others and facilitating others becoming connection-makers themselves, as I do at the Friends of the Fells or I have in my role as a teacher, is incredibly rewarding. I like doing good works. It makes me feel alive, complete.

Theory, theory, theory, practice ... oh, I have to implement now? I have come to realize that there are three types of people in the world: (a) implementers, (b) idea people (often managers), and those who have made the bridge between a and b. I would like to think that I fall into the last category, but that I haven't found the language to bridge both societies yet. I would like to be the "manager" that implements. The person who behaves as if there is a hierarchy, but speaks to team members as if there is no hierarchy. This requires a great deal of skillful communication, including getting people on board with ideas and decisive action items. Where do I get this language? Where do organizations get this language?

Lappé has something to say to me, and to us.

"To avoid the unintended backfiring of 'helpful' acts, we can dig to root causes, always asking: How am I interrupting a negative cycle that creates suffering or reinforcing a positive one that contributes to new, life-serving rules and norms?

To answer this question, for me it's helpful to distinguish between 'issues' and 'entry points.'

'Issues overwhelm. They hit us as distinct problems, piles and piles of them. We hear about child slavery, violence against women, hunger, of HIV/AIDS, deepening inequality, pollution and global heating, depression, failing schools ....

I feel buried, smothered under a mountain of problems. I want to cry uncle.

'Entry points' are very different.

Entry points we can detect because we're weaving a theory of causation ... They are deliberate actions that strengthen the flow of causation, putting in motion the Spiral of Empowerment ..." (p. 136-137)

Lappé is not suggesting we make action alone. She suggests we use groups and human connection to empower ourselves and others to make lasting change in the world by tackling our concerns head on. Entry points are theoretical planning strategies around which to organize honest, collective action. The planning is an end product, the relationships that result are end products, movement towards change is an end product, as is the change itself. Success can be measured on any one of those end products, even if we hope for all of them.

Again, Lappé teaches me to honor the process because this is the best way to prepare for future community work.

Leadership Learning Plan

Yesterday, I had another discussion about the economy with the headmaster of Waring. He is a mentor of mine and good friend of my mother's. I attended Waring from 1993-1997. My mom remained as the note-taker for the Executive Committee, as it was called then, years after I graduated college.

Peter explained the hiring status of independent schools--due to the economy--and told me he would let his fellow North Shore school heads know that I was looking. I thanked him and went home to search aisne.org for more job listings.

I search this site regularly, each time with a new set of eyes trying to find an appropriate job listing. What disturbs me most is that the number of years of previous experience required has jumped from 1 to 3, specifically at the high school level, in the past months. As Peter said, "Its a buyers market" so they can ask for whatever they want. Since I am trying to sell myself, I am out of luck without any years experience as a lead teacher of high school.

When I searched the site yesterday, I was thinking about tonight's meeting with Melanie about my leadership learning plan. How am I possibly going to get the experience I need to get a job and get a job in the next 5 years? Ugh. Stimulus package, where are you? Lightbulb!! Some independent schools offer formal mentorship programs, including one very well known school: Phillips Academy.

So far away? Not really. I live on i93, perhaps this is the reason. It is so far away for the mother of a one-year old and four-year old in a M.A. program. It is not for the graduate of said M.A. program with a two-year old and a five-year old (kindergarten!!). I e-mailed the administrator of the program this morning and she was quite positive and suggested if I were interested in 2011-12 that I apply in the fall and that they would know what they needed by November 2010.

Message from yesterday and the leadership learning plan: slow down. Hmm. Aren't we supposed to be being proactive? An interesting lesson. Sometimes being proactive is about slowing down.

Identity or Job?

When I graduated from college, I wore a green ribbon pinned to my gown with a small gold safety pin. It signified a promise my fellow "Marine Science Club" members and I had made to consider the environment before taking any job. What it meant to me at the time was that I should not be involved directly in environmental degradation or military defense work. In reality, I was looking more for an identity than a job, having just quit my Borders gig after getting into graduate school. Being in my early twenties, I believed that I was destined for a professorship, running a research lab, and teaching college students about Biology. A job. In fact, I identified as a Biologist. My job was as a graduate student, teacher of college lab sections, and mentor to 1-3 undergrads per semester in the laboratory. When I graduated from grad school I was six-months into a postdoctoral research position, my first "real" Biology job.

Or was it?

A post-doctoral position has the same student-adviser relationship plus benefits and masquerades as a job. Really it is an underpaid stint of research in which one is expected to publish and job hunt, for only a slightly less temporary employment. After years of being mentally invested in my "job", because it really was my identity, I was tired of not being taken seriously.

So I left and am now in the process of redefining my work-life balance. I want to be a high school science teacher at a private school, a place where I can be involved in curriculum development and scientific literacy training.

So here is the question. Am I going to be sad when next fall comes around and I still don't have a job? By the way, only teachers with multiple years experience at the high school level are being hired right now. I have a great deal invested in my volunteer work - community science curriculum development for the Fells Reservation (Medford, MA) - but can that be enough? Am I going to feel unemployed? Can I figure out a way for the volunteering I do to take the place of employment until I find my teaching job?

One barrier to this is that people that work in volunteer situations often don't have the same level of professionalism (personal boundaries) that employees in larger organizations have. Solutions? Demand it. More on that next post.

My mindful practice.

I resolve to stop doing things, "just because," but only right after I post a picture of this yummy-looking strawberry.

Over the weekend, I participated in my first in-person leadership course. Notably, I didn't talk as much as I normally do in class. Actually, I talked much less than I normally do ... and it felt good. I didn't dominate the conversation; I didn't try to steer the conversation in another direction; I actively listened and participated when moved to do so. Unfortunately, my movement towards less oral participation went too far the other way and I ended up confusing my classmates who, having met me in August 2009, were surprised at my relative silence and concerned for my well-being. This, of course, was not intended.

I need to find a better balance between throwing myself in full-force to professional conversations and being a wall-flower. However, I think I have made at least a few steps in the right direction towards not speaking out of turn or feeling the need to create more turns than others.