Sustainability and Joy

3-10-2009
11th & E, NW
Washington, DC

A small pastel bouquet of balloons – green, pink, yellow, white – just floated toward the sky between the Hotel Harrington and the ESPN Building. I can’t tell where they came from, and now can no longer see where they’ve gone.

Pastel balloons don’t really fit here. Compared with the communities I’ve visited across the South, more people here are wearing black and walking quickly. Every third one has a cell phone visibly in hand. The sidewalks are wide. The trees are tucked into small gaps in the concrete at regular but ungenerous intervals.

It’s a city.

Our Nation’s Capitol.

These are serious streets in a place of serious business, so there seems no good explanation for a pastel cluster of balloons. As if to beg the question, the helium nosegay dipped several times down toward the street before lifting from sight. With each dip, I wondered if the orbs bobbing between the fifth and sixth storey were somehow attached – a whimsical way of lifting attention from street level, of lifting the mood a bit.

My memories of DC, from my first visit with my sister and mom when I was 11, through the early 90’s when I came here regularly for American Psychological Association committee work and again over the past six years for work with the Institute for Tribal Government and the Office of Indian Education – those memories are consistent with what I see here today. Lots of grown ups – evidence of competence and focus. That’s a good thing. This place is for that combination.

Then came this morning. I stepped off the Metro and onto the National Mall. I looked west to the Washington Monument the east to the Capitol. Both, reassuringly, were still there and I found myself taking a deep breath – a relaxing breath. As I began walking into the city north of the mall I had a strong sense of something different – a slight shift in the feel of the place.

Efficacy remains everywhere in evidence; and pride – both in the clean, coiffed stretch of the Mall and extending across its skirt of urbanity. Yet even in its quicker city pace, even with technology so close in hand, there are more clusters of people chatting as they navigate the sidewalks. The line at Starbucks seems to move a bit more slowly without the usual tension/flip-outs of bureaucratic anxiety. And there are pastel balloons.

This morning on the Orange Line of the Metro a man in a suit stood up to take a photo of his 9 year old son, also in a suit, seated on the train and joyfully plugged in to his IPOD. I noticed the dad had earphones in too and offered to take a photo of the two of them “dressed alike.” This led to one of those perfect on-the-train conversations – the dad/son dyad from Boulder, CO and Bear Creek Elementary School.

Dad beamed as he described their day’s work: Attending the ceremony at the Capitol where they would accept for their school the 2008 James L. Oberstar Award – prestigious recognition given annually by The National Center for Safe Routes to School (http://www.bvsd.org/news/Pages/BearCreekOberstarAward.aspx). “Seventy percent of the kids at our school walk or bike every day,” Dad said. Son beamed. “It’s all about reducing our dependency on cars,” he said, “and about the kids teaching the whole community by example.” Son beamed. “That’s change,” Dad said as we all stood to get off at the Smithsonian station. Then he said, “We’re going to the Washington Monument, first.”

The dignified dyad stepped off the escalator. The smaller one skipped a step, then another one. They turned left, both of them winding up the cords of their earphones and, in unison, tucking them into their pockets.

Maybe the mood has lifted a bit here in DC. Maybe there’s a little more room for pastel balloons, for joy alongside agency in the face of challenges like sustainable transportation practices in urgent environmental and economic circumstances. Maybe the combined presence of joy and action is a key to the change Americans are talking about these days.

Two Things

2-24-2009
A Starbucks near Jamaica Drive, Jackson, MS

In Atoka, OK unleaded plus is selling for $1.89 a gallon. A bit farther down the road in Savanna, OK there’s an exit off OK65 for the US Army Ammunition Plant, followed immediately by an exit for Indian Nation Turnpike. In Savanna, I pass the John Deer place. It’s on the same side of the road as Country Quilts. By the time I get to McAlester, OK the main roads are named Peaceable and Electric.

Between Atoka and Savanna I pulled off the highway, turned on my emergency flashers, rolled down my window and took a photo of the sky. In front of the sky were two billboards. One read, “Got Choctaw?” Just below, the other read, “Sitting on top of the world: David’s Trading Yard.” The first billboard had a huge photo of a child in traditional regalia and gave the url: http://www.choctawnation.com/. The second sported a big green tractor. I liked them. So I stopped – proving, by the way, that going off the road south of Klamath Falls, OR did teach me a little about responsible highway photography.

The highway left Oklahoma and dumped me into Arkansas. With a strategic left, I made my way into the Ozarks hills around the Buffalo River and contained in the rural county of Searcy.

In keeping with the range of Americana evident through eastern Oklahoma, Searcy County has its own personality. The land was Indian Country – specifically, Osage – until 1808. Now, the population here reports itself as 97.26 white. One local mentioned, “There are lots of people with Indian ancestors here – Osage, Choctaw, Cherokee,” but except for some of the handshakes, that heritage was not much in evidence.

Later in our conversation, the same citizen of Searcy County pointed out the deserted lumber yard and cattle yards lining the narrow roads of Marshall, the county seat. He gestured toward modest one-story buildings and said, “This used to be a place of farms, ranches and timber. Now our most thriving economic force is Medicaid.”

As in much of rural America, the population of Searcy County is aging and the infrastructure is suffering from a small and shrinking tax base. Many roads remain unpaved, schools are under-funded, and there’s too little cushion for responding to the effects of destructive weather.

In the face of these realities, Randy, the high school teacher turned librarian who was raised in a family with generations of history farming and later ranching the Arkansas hills, emphasized again and again an obvious solution for his rural community. “We have to learn how to sustain ourselves on this land again – right here, with the families in this community. Our hope is in planting and eating with the seasons, turning off our TVs and looking around to see what our kids and neighbors need.”

Only days earlier, I’d sat in a Behavioral Economics class at the Hockaday School in Dallas, TX. The young women in the class were seniors – all of them anticipating college. Their instructor spoke of diminishing marginal utility, of saving and dis-saving. He referred to the assigned reading -- Thorstein Veblen.

These women will be leaders in the coming decades. They can have influence on economies – rural and urban. In a conversation with three of the Hockaday seniors after class, their honesty about their lack of exposure to the everyday concerns of many Americans was as striking as their anxiety about college applications. Consistently and without bate, they came back to wondering about, and really to challenging themselves to find ways to use their privilege to help solve the problems pressing on our country and our world. Their access to education hummed in the background – an invitation, even a mandate in their young consciousness to find ways to give back.

Pretty regularly I find myself writing about the “one thing” I’m noticing from day to day. The “one thing” from Highland Park in Dallas, TX to Marshall, AR in Searcy County is really two things. For every person I talk with life is very real. Circumstances vary radically but pain and joy, moments of confidence and moments of confusion are no less present.

Here’s the second thing. The Americans I’m talking with are concerned for the wellbeing of people beyond their families and communities. Everyone so far is talking about the relief, dialogue and sharing they want to see for and among everyone. This is new to me. Maybe it’s always been here. Maybe it’s newly being revived and spoken. For sure the media version of the American people can’t hold a candle to the large hearted essentially optimistic spirit I’ve been hearing down the west coast and on east from AZ to AR.

My friend Anthony has taken to sending daily inspirational quote from his current home in LA, CA. Today he sent this. I thought I’d pass it on.

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.
Meister Eckhart