By lev
It is so beautiful outside today! Continuing our commitment to post every day throughout the Baha’i Fast, here is the promised report about the junior youth group’s service project.
Based on a visit to one of the homes of the junior youth, we had agreed to offer service with some of the elderly folks at the Community Family day center. It was a wonderful experience. We had prepared the previous week by making cards with the quotation “…let your heart burn with loving-kindness for all who may cross your path.” On the back of each card, the junior youth wrote questions about friendship, such as “What does friendship mean to you,” or “How have you experienced friendship in your life?” These questions tied in nicely with conversations we had been having within the junior youth group.
The staff and the elders at Community Family were happy to have us, and were very kind. We ended up having a productive conversation about friendship, and then the junior youth played some games with the elders.
After the activities, we walked home together and reflected about our experiences. One of the junior youth remarked that he wasn’t sure what the elders at the center really needed, and we talked about his understanding that service should be about the needs of other people – not about your own desires. We agreed that the best way to better understand the needs of the elders at the center would be to continue to get to know them by visiting and spending time with them.
Next week we will find out whether the junior youth want to continue this kind of service project, or focus on something else. But I have no doubt that they’ve demonstrated their capacity to act, reflect, and consult about making a difference in their community.
By lev
Yesterday, we had a small insight about the Baha’i Fast. As sundown approached, I noticed that I was really looking forward to the sun going down so I could eat! And in that moment, it occurred to me that what I should really be looking forward to with that level of anticipation was the sun coming up. After all, it was sunrise that marked the beginning of some 11 hours worth of renunciation, undertaken “out of love for Thee and for Thy good-pleasure.” That was the thing I ought to be looking forward to. If all I was looking forward to was getting to break the fast, then somehow it seemed to be more about me and my ability to eat food than about fasting for love of God.
That’s as deep as I’m going to get this morning. Junior youth group is heading out to undertake a service project this afternoon, and then we’re off to a home visit. Will post back with any reflections. In the meantime, enjoy a new blog from Chicago musician Bahhaj: Dad of Doubles: a father on the exquisite agony of raising twins. My most recent memory of Bahhaj is going to see a Michael Chabon reading on the top floor of Chicago’s Harold Washington Library with him and Carolyn. Somehow his style on Dad of Doubles, and his examination of fatherhood, reminds me of Chabon.
By lev
Tonight was the first midterm for Linear Algebra, a class I am ostensibly taking to prepare myself for graduate study. The last question on the exam was especially challenging for me. It felt as though I had the pieces I needed, but didn’t know how to fit them together to yield a solution. I banged my head against it for quite a long time, ultimately leaving a note explaining my reasoning, and heading out into Harvard Square to retrieve the car, and pick up Negin at her lab.
One topic that came up during the cluster agency meeting last night was ego, and the way that we leap to defensiveness and criticism when our ego-cultivated identity is put at risk. I’ve been noticing this a lot in the last 24 hours, and it feels good to notice it, and try to re-focus my attention in that moment.
“The ego wants to be right, so it has to create a situation where there is a wrong. With that dichotomy, then the ego places itself in the right and in this way can constantly strengthen itself. We create an identity that is built up on these experiences – but this identity is based on illusion. …These are the mental tests blowing over the friends.” (From the consultation last night)
I guess the mental stress that accompanied confronting a challenging math problem is one example of this. I conceive of myself as someone who is intelligent – as someone who possesses knowledge, and when the problem wouldn’t fit together, then that illusory identity was placed at risk.
Outside of the exam, in the car driving to meet Negin and head home to Lowell, the pieces started to move and fall into place in my head. I remembered that we can create a transformation matrix with respect to any basis by combining the coordinate vectors of the transformed basis vectors. And so we try to develop our capacity for mathematical reasoning without buying into notions of knowledge as commodity or unchanging foundation.
And, so you don’t go home empty-handed: here’s a link to a great blog that Raina passed on to us: Advancing the Spirit of Economics.
By lev
Last night we talked a lot about building capacity, and the necessity of being in a humble posture of learning. (This all in preparation for Northeast Massachusetts’ upcoming cluster reflection meeting!) We talked about the value of questions, and the interplay between anecdotes and questions as an overarching approach to building capacity.
As a side benefit, participants in the reflection meeting may not realize that they can ask questions. If we’re all constantly in a posture of nodding sagaciously and saying, “Yes, yes — I understand,” then we rob ourselves of an opportunity to learn. Mired in ego and the illusory self-image of “one who knows,” we propagate the idea that knowledge is a commodity to be collected and possessed. Better by far to write down a question as you listen to the story, to see yourself as a learner — as being in that humble posture of learning rather than in an all-knowing posture of ego.
“To optimize the use of these capacities, the individual draws upon…the transformative forces that operate upon his soul as he strives to behave in accordance with the divine laws and principles.” (From the 1996 Ridvan message, published in The Four Year Plan: Messages of the Universal House of Justice.)
Day 3 of the Baha’i Fast begins!
March 4, 2010 – 7:10 am
|
By lev
This month’s Atlantic Magazine has an in-depth piece on Walmart’s “Heritage Agriculture” program:
The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.”
Read the whole thing at “The Great Grocery Smackdown.” It’s a good read, but I’m more fascinated by an academic-meets-business movement referred to in the piece, called “Agile Agriculture.” Most of the online information is available through the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas. Among other goals, the endeavor hopes to provide “increased profitability [to producers] from new marketing opportunities,” “meet consumer desire for local and regional products,” and “reduce transportation costs and GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
Walmart says it wants to revive local economies and communities that lost out when agriculture became centralized in large states. (The heirloom varieties beloved by foodies lost out at the same time, but so far they’re not a focus of Walmart’s program.) This would be something like bringing the once-flourishing silk and wool trades back to my hometown of Rockville, Connecticut. It’s not something you expect from Walmart, which is better known for destroying local economies than for rebuilding them.
Agile Agriculture is apparently a national partnership made up of, among others, Drake, the University of New Hampshire, and the American Farmland Trust. What’s the point? “To get more locally grown produce into grocery stores and restaurants, the partnership is centralizing and streamlining distribution for farms with limited growing seasons, limited production, and limited transportation resources.” So is this all a good thing? What do you think?
By negin
by Naomi Shihab Nye (shared with me by the beloved Mad Johnson)
The Arabs have a saying:
When a stranger comes to your door
feed him for 3 days without ever asking his name,
where he has come from and where he is going.
Because by then he will be able to answer,
But of course, by then, you won’t care.
Let’s get back to that, then–
What is it that you want? Rice? Pine nuts?
Here take this red brocade pillow
while my child feeds water to your horse.
No, I was not busy when you came.
I wasn’t even pretending to be busy.
That is the armor people of the last century
put on to appear as if they had a purpose.
I will not be claimed.
Here, your plate is waiting.
Let me snip fresh mint into your tea.
February 18, 2010 – 1:47 pm
|
By negin
As we all keep the citizens of Haiti in our prayers, also check out this interesting website. Solar power in a suitcase, designed for use in health care facilities in places where the power supply is unsteady:
We Care Solar
They’ve been working hard to send a bunch of these to Haiti.
Let us know what other opportunities for action you have encountered!
“When such a crisis sweeps over the world no person should hope to remain intact. We belong to an organic unit and when one part of the organism suffers all the rest of the body will feel its consequence. This is in fact the reason why Baha’u'llah calls our attention to the unity of mankind.” -Shoghi Effendi
January 20, 2010 – 10:03 am
|
By negin
by Robert E. Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
January 18, 2010 – 2:49 pm
|
By lev
As we embark on an examination of what it means to be both a scholar and a Baha’i, this passage from Ronald Coase seems to align generally with our conceptual framework:
“As I see it, progress in understanding the working of the economic system will come from an interplay between theory and empirical work. The theory suggests what empirical work might be fruitful, the subsequent empirical work suggests what modification in the theory or rethinking is needed, which in turn leads to new empirical work. If rightly done, scientific research is a never-ending process, but one that leads to greater understanding at each stage.”
–Ronald Coase, “The Conduct of Economics: The Example of Fisher Body and General Motors, 2006″
And this in light of the following quotation from the Prosperity of Humankind document prepared by the Baha’i International Community:
The most important role that economic efforts must play in development lies, therefore, in equipping people and institutions with the means through which they can achieve the real purpose of development: that is, laying foundations for a new social order that can cultivate the limitless potentialities latent in human consciousness.
–BIC, The Prosperity of Humankind
