Kia ora, hola, and happy Cinco de Mayo! I’m finding the interwebs unbearable today with fake assassination images and impassioned reactions, so I thought I’d toss in a list of inspiring, beautiful and delicious things that I’m loving in the hopes they may nourish your senses instead.

1. These Smythson elephant motif correspondence cards, gifted me by Aunt Lainie.
2. Democracy Now Earth Day special featuring fantastic interview with Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the rights of Mother Earth, and a powerful speech by Van Jones at the PowerShift 2011 conference
3. Chile rellenos, homemade habanero salsa, y margaritas (y huevos rancheros, y tacos pescado…) at La Boca Loca in Miramar, Wellington, New Zealand
4. Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth, by Lisa Napoli
5. Becoming Transhuman (Part 3: Resolving), a dance through the Bardo with shamans, guided by Mark Pesce in his 2001 magnum opus recently uploaded to YouTube
6. L’Abandon, the new album from Tucson, Arizona chanteuse, Marianne Dissard. This is music to get dressed by when you’re dressing to kill.
7. So Beautiful or So What, the so beautiful new album by Paul Simon.
8. Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us? is a must-see. Here are my notes at Garden.Geek.NZ

A recent live talk with Peter Senge through Calliflower introduced me both to this great tool for conference calls and webinars and Senge’s compelling new book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals And Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World.

Calliflower impressed me with sophisticated features for managing and participating in calls with an interface that’s elegant and easy to understand. (See below.) It can record calls as MP3 files to make available afterwards. And, it’s free.

I found it through Facebook and was able to participate fully from the event page in the browser without having to launch Skype or pick up a phone. Talkshoe offers a similar service but was not nearly as seamless in my last experience (a while ago, worth revisiting).

The only part I don’t understand is the business model. But it definitely shifted the quality of my listening, which dovetails perfectly into the the message in Peter Senge’s new book.

You can download the talk with Peter Senge in mp3 format. (It’s free, but registration required). My notes from his talk are below.

Ask yourself in your business or organization, what is the essence of this community? Making money is a necessary ingredient for successful business, but it doesn’t define what a successful business is. Developing high quality of relationships creates great organizations. Another way to define success is a learning organization, able to sense deep changes in its environment.

What is ending is the industrial age. What people don’t understand is that changes in dominant technologies has become defining factor of industrial age. The values of society became very different. People forgot the are a part of nature. Native people, Aboriginal people don’t have any problem knowing they’re part of nature.

We are coming up against all sorts of environmental limits. More and more of us are finding it difficult to ignore. It takes a ton of raw materials each day to support each American’s lifestyle — all of which ends up as waste. Why don’t we notice it?

Why does nobody notice that every living system operates on sunlight (except a few deep underwater)?

Why does nobody notice there is no waste in nature?

The idea of an “age” is a deeply held group of assumptions. These imbalances have been building for years by ways of living that contradict the natural world.

The challenges around climate change, water and food are all interrelated and products of an age, a pattern of thinking. Until we think differently, none of these will change. An age starts to change when people think differently.

There are so many doom & gloomers out there not really causing any change at all just making us more afraid. It doesn’t help any of us to go into denial about our current reality. The mainstream media doesn’t go into deeper changes because they’re gradual. The real story is slow steady changes have been occurring over the last decade or even longer.

The tragedy of the commons has become a metaphor for a whole host of issues. The commons is any common resource we depend upon. Historically, it meant a place where people graze their cattle together. If we just use it as a basis for individual gain, we’ll destroy the commons and we’ll all lose.

One example is the world fish stocks. 70% of the world fisheries are overfished — so much so that their recovery is in doubt. Everbody’s out getting as much fish as they can, leading to steady depletion and then collapse. Things get harder, so we work harder. At some point you have to stop and step back.

About 7 or 8 years ago, Coke got into difficulties in India over water usage. For the first time, they began looking at the whole supply chain for making code. They never before paid attention to the amount of water that goes into the sugar cane that goes into coke. Now they are becoming a world leader to promote watersheds.

It’s too simplistic to blame corporations. The problems we’re facing are not because of a few bad guys. You and I buy coke. We buy the tea. The corporation thinks it’s citizenry that’s the source of the problem. There’s a co-evolution.

The transcendent goal: we’re all going to have to hang together, or we’re going to hang separately.

Now we have the hard work of opening up mental models. None of us sees the whole system. We really do need each other to bring about deep change, learn how to see the bigger picture and collaborate. The Necessary Revolution is filled with diagrams, models and lists to give not just information but how some actually do this.

What’s the one thing that starts moving groups in the right direction? Things shift when the quality of listening shifts. When you listen to someone, do you hear what they say? Or do you hear what you want them to say? Do you develop inquiry into that question? 99 times out of a hundred, we end up in a debate and both parties usually feel like they one. But their views won’t change.

What if nobody knows the answer?
What if everyone sees a different part?
What if we really do need each other?
Then we really do need to listen to each other and learn to understand each other.

Moving beyond problem solving into creation, beyond reaction into proaction, the creativity.

We’re at the very beginning. The industrial age didn’t start overnight. No one was in charge of rolling it out. Despite the increasing concern about climate change, the amount of emissions exceeded all of the forecasts last year — our ship is stlil acceslerating in the wrong directon.

If we could start to get the ship turned and we all get involved, it will start to turn. Maybe it’s not just a monoculture of big global corporatons. Maybe we’ll have more diversity to organizations.

one principle – the regenerative society – based on the way nature works. Nature has a love affair with diversity. Nature just keeps producing different things. Different types of organizations. Everybody can do the job they really want to do and not need to fit some mold created by someone else.

The iconic imagery of the industrial age was the assembly line, exemplifying standardization and productivity.

Nature on the other hand tends toward uniqueness, interrelationships, fecundity, degenerativity — a world we’d much rather live in. What might that mean for how we live with other beings? What might that mean if we give up the idea that the boss is the top?

One final thing – at a basic level we have to return to a belief in trust. People want to do the right thing. We have to start believing that again. Lead or let them have the space they need to tell their part of the story and make their part of the conclusion.

On Monday, I visited the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington for a discussion on ‘first fictions’ with the writers of two of last year’s most highly praised debut novels here. Mary McCallum (The Blue ) and Susan Pearce (Acts of Love) explored the themes and process of creating their books with Kate Duignan, also a New Zealand novelist. They are all new to me, and I am intrigued to read The Blue, about life in an isolated whaling community on Arapawa Island in the Marlborough Sounds in 1938.

Kate asked great questions, stimulating a lively discussion. One interesting commonality she brought up was that both authors created protagonists that live in small, isolated communities who start out feeling as if they had already failed in life. That resonated as a theme I see recurring in the way New Zealand describes itself in its own media.

Later that evening, McCallum won the Society of Authors Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction and the Readers’ Choice Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards for The Blue. Another prize-winner I’d like to check out is Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning, a publication tracing the career of this contemporary painter whose exhibition of anthropomorphic birds in luminous palettes with the same name drew me back multiple times.

Meanwhile, back in New York, the NYT reviewed a new book about a Boston girl who married a Maori man, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story by Christina Thompson. Will have to download the first chapter and see what I think for myself. (By the way, the ability to freely download first chapters of books is one of my favorite features of the Kindle, which has become an invaluable essential for this traveler. If you want to keep reading, then you buy and immediately download the rest directly from the device.)

Today you can see this photo I took of Robert Thurman standing in front of Mt. Kailash in the San Francisco Chronicle, accompanying a great interview with Robert by David Ian Miller, “Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman on Why the Dalai Lama Matters,” about his new book, Why the Dalai Lama Matters.

In the picture, Robert stands near the Tarboche flagpole at the outset of our kora (circumambulation) around Mt Kailash. Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Bön traditions all revere Mt Kailash as the axis mundi – the center of the world. From it flows 4 major rivers that feed Asia: the Indus, Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Karnali. Thousands of pilgrims arrive each May and June, but this year China has delayed the pilgrimage season and limited the number of participants, restricting all foreign visitors during the Olympic torch relay in that region.

After four days trekking around the mountain and reaching an altitude of 18,600 ft, we arrived back here in time for the Saga Dawa festival, celebrating the birth and enlightenment of Sakyamuni Buddha.

On this occasion, the flag pole, wrapped in prayer flags, is raised by poles, ropes and trucks.

A perfectly upright flagpole signifies a good year for Tibet.

Musicians play throughout the festival. Thermoses of yak butter tea keep throats in singing and horn-blowing condition at dry high-altitudes on the Tibetan plateau.

Then, at the moment the flagpole is raised, thousands of windhorses (colorful squares of paper printed with prayers for happiness) fill the air and fly towards the peak.

Saga Dawa occurs each year on the 15th day of the fourth lunar month. This year, Tibetans will celebrate Saga Dawa on June 18, 2008 — may the pole stand upright and usher in a good year for Tibet!

An excerpt from the SF Chronicle interview:

The news from Tibet has been pretty grim lately, but you remain optimistic that the situation will improve … that the Tibetans will one day be able to live there freely and practice their religion. What gives you hope that will happen?

I base my hope — as the Dalai Lama bases his — on what is realistic. And I believe reality dictates that the Tibetans are the ones who can live sustainably in Tibet. They’re the ones who can restore and maintain the Tibetan plateau, their ancestral home, as they have for thousands of years. And it has to be healthy in order to be of benefit to its neighboring regions. It’s the water tower of Asia — it’s where everybody’s water comes from, India, China, Southeast Asia. It’s also the source of the wind — the jet stream that rises up out of the plateau, affecting the weather all around the planet. So if Tibet is messed up then the world gets messed up. This is why Tibet should matter to everybody.

To learn more:

• Robert Thurman’s latest book Why the Dalai Lama Matters (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells)
• Journey around Mt Kailash (without leaving the comfort of your favorite reading chair) Circling the Sacred Mountain by Tad Wise and Robert Thurman
• Journey around Mt Kailash when China lifts restrictions on travel in Tibet with Geographic Expeditions.
• Upcoming events with Robert Thurman. If you’re new New York, there’s a talk and booksigning Tuesday June 17 at Tibet House and a talk on inner peace at the Tibet Center in Brooklyn on Wednesday June 18.

I had noted I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley as a book I would probably enjoy reading, but without a sense of urgency. Then comes this short film and these diorama diaries. Sloane creates elaborate multi-media dioramas in lucite boxes for a bunch of her stories and brings them to life in these videos. Ha! I am falling in love. And ordering your book. Thanks for making me laugh!

“Like most people I imagine do, I have three sets of magnetic poetry. I don’t know why you wouldn’t. One of them is cat themed, which is in no way pathetic.” (from Diary of a Diorama: Smell This)

Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are, Coming to Our Senses, Full Catastrophe Living, and Arriving at Your Own Door, opened the conversation with a gorgeous poem from which the title of his latest book came:

The second poem Kabat-Zinn used was by a poet from whom the name of yours truly was inspired. (Thanks Mom and Dad):

During the discussion, he defined meditation as “attention in service of self-understanding and liberation.” He also used “awarenessing” as a verb in places where you might expect to hear “thinking” instead.

Both he and Bokara somehow started to blame technology for accelerating time, to which I respectfully disagree. Oddly enough, my brother gave me a book on just that topic this week, The Mayan Code, which asserts that time acceleration is a manifestation of the acceleration of consciousness. So perhaps it’s Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bokara who are responsible for this phenomenon through talks like these! Your thoughts (and awarenesses) welcome, of course.

Once uploaded, people can bookmark, share and comment on it. Text is searchable so the document is easy to find. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of publications. Finally, you can also post and embed Issuu documents on any external site.

Now actually, it’s still not a joy to quote, because you apparently can’t deep link in there, and you can’t copy and paste text and do all the things you could do with a standard webpage (or PDF for that matter). But it’s so close… you can almost taste it. And you can just embed the whole darn thing… In any case, this is a wonderful way to share the experience of a printed thing (without the waste and expense of printing and shipping).

N.B. to those who like to tear, save and share the parts they like out of printed things… you’ll love Skitch.

Kenro Izu: Bhutan, the Sacred Within
November 2, 2007–February 18, 2008
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011

What a treat to hear Kenro Izu talk with Owen Flanagan at the Rubin Museum of Art in conjunction with the opening of his exhibition of photographs, “Bhutan: The Sacred Within.” Kenro Izu’s been exploring and photographing sacred sites both natural and manmade for decades. To look at his landscapes of sacred places around the world is to enter them; you can almost smell and taste the air inside the image. In “The Sacred Within,” he turns his lens to the essential element that makes a place sacred: the people that revere it and hold it in their hearts.

Out of all the places he has photographed, Bhutan has especially captivated him, drawing him back six times over six years. Izu writes in the introduction to his accompanying book, Bhutan, “Traveling many years, I have not yet seen a place as peaceful as Bhutan, or a place affecting such a peacefulness within myself. If there is a place indeed named Utopia, this place may come the closest to it.”

Bhutan, known as the “Land of the Thunder Dragon,” is a small independent country of 700,000 people nestled in the Himalayan mountains between China, Tibet and India. What struck him on his first visit was how unique it was among Himalayan lands with its abundance of lush green trees and glacier fed rivers. He was moved by how the high altitude air was unusually moist and dense. And he was struck by how rich the people seemed, which he noted might sound odd considering the average GNP per capita is under US $1000, but he never saw anyone begging for money. Instead, people appeared well fed and well dressed, even happy.

Kenro Izu’s custom-built large format camera on display at Rubin Museum of Art, 2005. Photo by Emily Davidow

Izu travels with a custom-built large-format camera with a 14″ x 20″ negative that captures the density of the air and the quality of light. His large format platinum palladium prints appear illuminated from within, offering a depth that transcends two dimensions. That also makes them an ideal medium for portraits. Why did it take Izu such a long time to shift from the sacred places to the people that make them so? “I am shy of people. Can’t point the camera at them.”

Spontanaeity is another challenge with his turn-of-the-last-century technology. Every picture has to be staged, “like a diorama of a scene.” He described the process of making an image that looks like a candid of two schoolboys walking and looking back at him (Druk #537, Bumthang, Bhutan 2007). He had seen them walking to school near Tamshing Lhakhang in the morning and envisioned the shot, but they were in a rush to get to school, so he set up to meet them after school and take the photograph.

While the images may not be spontaneous, Izu pointed out how un-self-conscious, authentic and neutral his subjects seemed. This neutrality is something Izu aspires to himself, as he repeated in several ways the idea that “I always want to be myself, not bigger or smaller.” To Izu, it seems the Bhutanese have found a middle way between the precious modesty of the Japanese and the super-sized egos of America.

Is this lack of self-consciousness due to inner peace, Buddhist ideas of the self, or freedom from the continuous stream of marketing images in America and Japan (where Izu, now a Brooklyn resident, was born)? Bhutan just launched television and Internet service in 1999, and the Bhutanese are consciously creating media that reflects their values and culture rather than relying on foreign imports. Even the movie theaters are filled with steady streams of Bhutanese feature films. I had hoped we’d get more deeply into this in discussion with Flanagan, a professor of psychology, brain sciences and neurobiology at Duke University, as well as the author of The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World and the paper ‘The Bodhissattva’s Brain: The Neuroscience of Wisdom, Virtue, and Happiness,’ but I’ll have to check those out along with his talks online from the Mind and Reality Symposium to learn more about his thoughts on these issues.

Kenro Izu, Druk # 545 Jambay Lhakhang, Bumthang, Bhutan, 2007, Carbon pigment print, 52 x 36 in.

Izu introduced Bhutan’s progress indicator of GNH (Gross National Happiness), declared more important than GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck as early as 1986. According to the Bhutanese government’s definition, Gross National Happiness depends upon four main pillars: economic self-reliance, environmental stewardship, cultural preservation and good governance.

Cultural preservation refers to the teachings and practice of Buddhism that infuse every aspect of life and value wisdom and compassion*. It also encompasses aesthetic values of beauty and harmony. (China’s a PC, Bhutan is a Mac.) Izu captures many of the Bhutanese traditions in his portraits: the indigenous ceremonial Tsechu masks and costumes, tulkus (reincarnated rinpoches), meditating monks, and families enjoying each other.

Flanagan brought up Aristotle’s observation that if you ask people what is the greatest good, everyone will agree that it is happiness. But if you ask people to define happiness, everyone offers up a different answer. He also noted that while the people in Izu’s portraits looked happy, they weren’t exuding a feeling of “happy happy joy joy” so much as serenity and equanimity. He framed the discussion asking Izu whether it was a real happiness, and if so, what is that happiness?

Izu offered a more personal definition from his guide in Bhutan, along with a lively photo exemplifying it: “three generations under one roof, tea, rice and healthy, enjoying life.” Both Izu and Flanagan seemed wistful about the depth and strength of these familial relationships in contrast to the dispersed nuclear families of contemporary Japan and America. Asked but not answered: Is that the price of modernity? And is what the Bhutanese have impossible in the modern world?

As I viewed Izu’s exhibition, I couldn’t help thinking about the portraits of Edward S. Curtis, a photographer who used similar methods to document Native American people. Curtis set out to catalog their ceremonies, beliefs, daily life and landscapes in twenty volumes of “The North American Indian” before it was too late. Although the conditions of the Bhutanese people in 2007 are vastly different from those of the Native American people of 1907, there are striking visual parallels between the black and white images depicting the spiritual life of both cultures with their exquisite textiles, shamanistic masks, and ritual objects, taken by admiring outsiders. Will Bhutan lose its culture as it opens itself up to global communications and technology, foreign travelers and investment, and new forms of government or can it hold on to its sacred within?

Of course, awareness of both impermanence and the interconnectedness of all things is central to their Buddhist teachings. The last image Izu presented illustrated that with an image of a young girl in a field of cosmos flowers (Druk #444, 2006). He saw this herbaceous perennial in pink, red and white dancing all over the foot of the Himalayan mountains and figured it must be the national flower of Bhutan. What a surprise to learn the species was introduced only 50 years ago by an Irish doctor who brought antibiotics to Bhutan along with a single bag of cosmos flower seeds to remind him of home. He couldn’t have imagined these lovely blossoms would find such an ideal combination of soil and climate in the Himalayas.

Indeed, who can predict what will take root and flourish between the cross-pollination of cultures? May the seeds of GNH — oh, let’s go for GGH (Gross Global Happiness) — take root and blossom in hospitable growing media as people encounter the concept. Izu’s exhibition is a beautiful place to start.

* The finer points of how to manifest GNH are continually unfolding and will be explored at the Third International Conference on Gross National Happiness held in Bangkok, Thailand November 22-28, 2007. The ongoing discussion can be followed at the Centre for Bhutan Studies.