Category: culture of love

The 7 things I would never tell my mother – NOT!

Mom is in the middle with her mod friends!I have four “serious” blog posts half edited and I haven’t found the focus to complete them. So why not veer wildly…

Elana tagged me with an ever twisting blog meme “7 Things You Would Never Tell Your Mother.” I say twisted, because Yvonne DiVita  author of Dickless Marketing and the Lipsticking Blog already twisted the meme once.
Uh, well, what if your mother reads your blog? I think my mom has at least peeked at mine. Talk about social media and boundary hopping. Elana, I’m going to twist the meme again, and try and think of others to tag who have their moms as readers. Then we’ll find out if they ARE reading.

Here is the original:  The 7 Things I Would Never Tell My Mother Meme

Here is my twist: 7 Things You Want to Tell Your Mother in a Subtle Way via Your Blog

  1. My job really isn’t overthrowing small countries. Despite what my sons say at dinner time. But I do get to work with people in many countries – this year I was face to face in 7 countries and online with people from about 12 more.
  2. I do have an offline social life. I actually just went out for coffee today with a new colleague interested in online learning. And yeah, I met her online. But she lives within 20 miles. Doesn’t that count?
  3. I do get dressed for work, just not every day. While I was in Germany last month I got dressed for 8 whole days. Yes, now I’m back to warm yoga pants, sweaters and fleece. And woolly socks. It is cold in Seattle this week.
  4. My chocolate addiction is about quality, not quantity. (It is really Larry who eats the quantity in this family. Right, Larry? Naw, I don’t think you read my blog. Do ya?)
  5. My drive to contribute to the world comes from you, Mom. You were a volunteer as long as I can remember. Now I see you volunteering later in your life, and I notice how much it energizes you and keeps you young. I hope to always follow in your generous footsteps.
  6. My ability to cook a good meal comes from you. When I was younger, you were always experimenting. You come from good cooking genes from Grammy B, and added your own California flare. I remember my friends, when we moved to Pennsylvania, always thought your West Coast cooking was quite exotic!
  7. I think you are brave moving to Seattle. I appreciate that this move is as much for us, your kids, as it is for you and dad to have less house responsibility and more time to engage with life. No more house to clean. But moving here to Seattle, because we want you near one of your three kids, is a big leap. I promise, it will be a great one and all of us are standing by to make sure that happens.

Happy Holidays – send a message out to your mom on your blog. See if she reads it. And as for tagging, let’s see:

  • Jory – Because I know your mom reads your blog!
  • Bev – I know your mom has passed away, but since she was really a blogger before her time, maybe she can still get the RSS feed in heaven (or wherever you believe her spirit resides)
  • Ashley – because you are really good at expressing love online
  • Steve – I don’t know if your mom is alive (this makes this picking a bit difficult, eh) but I expect you might say something very insightful. How’s that for pressure?
  • Jim – to see how far you will stray in your blog focus these days. 🙂

The Girl Effect – catalyzing positive change

This morning on Twitter, Idocente pointed me to The Girl Effect. WOW! As some of you know, I have been a champion of the GiGis (Girl Geeks in service of the World Cafe community) and have long been a (prejudiced) champion of females in changing the world. So it is no surprise I had a positive response to this site.  Take a look at the video.

Over breakfast today in Bonn, where I’m doing some work this week, my friend Ulf and I were talking about where we have seen positive change take place.  (Check out his cool work with Science-Connects.) We shared stories about how things seem to work better from the ground up. Where people with passion and ownship make things happen, building on assets and in spite of barriers. Girls and women are certainly catalysts for this in many parts of the world. Take a look at this data from The Girl Effect fact sheet (pdf).

  • When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children. (United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population 1990.)
  • An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10 to 20 percent. An extra year of secondary school: 15 to 25 percent. (George Psacharopoulos and Harry Anthony Patrinos, “Returns to Investment in Education: A Further Update,” Policy Research Working Paper 2881[Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2002].)
  • Research in developing countries has shown a consistent relationship between better infant and child health and higher levels of schooling among mothers. (George T. Bicego and J. Ties Boerma, “Maternal Education and Child Survival: A Comparative Study of Survey Data from 17 Countries,” Social Science
    and Medicine 36 (9) [May 1993]: 1207–27.)
  • When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man. (Phil Borges, with foreword by Madeleine Albright, Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World [New York: Rizzoli, 2007], 13.)

Since I was in Israel and Palestine last month, I have been struggling on how to write about my experience in a way that is not about judgement, but about reflecting what I saw. The tyranny of person over person is heartbreaking, regardless of the reasons and justifications we create. But from what I saw and learned about, women and children are victims as Israel and Palestine continue without a solution for sustainable peace. The statistics around maternal and child health paint a compelling picture that war, occupation, and the patterns that trigger them are bad for women and children. High levels of maternal depression correlate with poor child nutrition. Raising rates of stunting in children from persistent malnourishment (low nutrition and poor nutrition) are staggering. Cultural challenges that resist healthy patterns of breast feeding and trigger increased poor child health and adult obesity and heart disease in Palestinians.

Where is the hope for something better? For basic human rights of food, shelter, clothing, clean food and water and yes, even peace?

It is with the women.

The women of Palestine and Israel, both, who build bridges across the divides were the most compelling points of light I experienced amongst the bleakness that presented itself. At the conference I was attending, I met a midwife who works for the Jazoor Foundation for Health and Social Development who gave me one of the few moments of light and hope I felt during my visit. She was passionate about her profession of helping women have healthier babies. She was passionate about teaching others to be midwives, even amongst professional disdain from other health care professionals. (US midwives will remember the time when they were dismissed by doctors, and are now an important part of the maternal child health system.) Her brains, her heart, her attitude radiated light. She worked with other amazing, passionate advocates for health, social development and peace in the organization, led by another brilliant, passionate woman. (I’m kicking myself for not having her name handy, but it is on my home computer and I’m on the road!)

Women who are catalyzing positive change.

I would name this radiant midwife, and share a short video we made of her, but I have not asked her permission. I’ll try and remmber to do that when I get home to let you experience a bit of her light.

So the message of The Girl Effect site resonated with me this morning. Wherever we work – in businesses, education, non profit, or independent spirits in the world, what are we doing to foster this light in girls and women? Because so far, they are the best bet I can see for making positive change in the world. By no means am I dismissing boys. But girls are so often dismissed, when they may be the best chance we’ve got.

(A small suggestion to the Girl Effect folks. Your about page is in flash, making it hard to copy and share the stats. Yes, I know I can download the data, but that is one more step. Plus data is still locked in a PDF. For strong virality, making it simpler and easier may be more important than making it slick. )

The Book of Love

I have written in the past about the power of love. Keith Olbermann gives a tour de force editorial on why this culture is needed in the world as a response to the passage of California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage. You can see it, and see the transcript here –>  Olbermann: Gay marriage is a question of love – Countdown with Keith Olbermann- msnbc.com

At the end of his comments, Olbermann said:

This is the second time in ten days I find myself concluding by turning to, of all things, the closing plea for mercy by Clarence Darrow in a murder trial.

But what he said, fits what is really at the heart of this:

“I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam,” he told the judge. It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all: So I be written in the Book of Love; I do not care about that Book above. Erase my name, or write it as you will, So I be written in the Book of Love.”

Edited Later: See also this video from the weekend march in Seattle from Ashley and Thomas
http://vimeo.com/2259354. Again, the theme is Love.

“I don’t normally write about…”

Dancing in Nairobi upon election of ObamaI’m at my desk early and am seeing the signs every where. In Twitter about election results from not just the US part of my network, but globally. I was reminded at least 10 times by friends overseas yesterday to vote. This morning (and indeed all this Fall) I wake up to blog posts on blogs that never or rarely talk about politics, expressing their reactions. Janet Clarey. states the refrain right off…

I normally don’t write about politics here but today isn’t normal.

There are two lessons that strike me, aside from the tide-turning change that this election may bring both the US and the network of other countries we are inevitably connected to.

  1. In a complex world, the boundaries of domains, of themes of focus, are inevitably interrupted by the fact that boundaries shift and blur. So while a business person might desire to refrain from politics on his or her blog (See Lee LeFever’s post a while back), politics is a part of life, and life is a part of business. So the question is, how do we decide in our social media participation where and how to draw boundaries that are often just constructs. Life is messy.
  2. Hope is infectious and I’m glad. I’ll carry that hope into my own personal action and support for my country’s’ leaders and citizens of the world to make the world better. I feel that infection rolling across my networks. I’m also aware that my networks are more politically homogeneous than the world, and that there are others today who may feel a loss of hope. They deserve hope too, so I appreciated Obama’s inclusiveness and seriousness about that in his acceptance speech. It is a theme that winds deeply back into my work, beyond any politics.

Touch DrawingSo in the end, a post about politics, something I don’t normally write about, is also embedded in the work of connection, communication, community and change. As I travel overseas as an American in the last months, everyone asked me about the election. It gave them hope and, I sensed, some reason to re-embrace their relationship with America. I am imagining my friends in Kenya, who have been through a horrible time with their own elections, and can envision them dancing in the streets like many have in cities across the US – a newfound sense of connection.

I can’t deny it. I am waking up today with hope. May this next era be an era of hard work. More of a culture of love than of war. An era of hope in a time of huge challenges.

From Mitten:


Mixtape from http://favtape.com/artist/ok go

Photos:

  • creative commons on Flickr from Maruko

4 Meetings, 6 Planes, and lots of amazing friends

Sao Miguel Island CalderaI’m back from over three weeks of travel in Europe and I realized that if I didn’t sit down and write at least one blog post, no matter how trite or incomplete, I will have gone nearly a month without a blog post and I’ve not done that since I started this blog (over on it’s original blogger home) in 2004. The fact that I missed my own blogaversary in May this year tells you that blogging has simply become part of the fabric of my work and life, and yet this gap… oi! I have tons of drafted posts and lots of things that I “planned” to blog about, but time has been tight.

I was in the UK and Portugal the last three weeks to facilitate one meeting, present at a conference and both support and participate in the KM4Dev annual gathering that happened this year in Almada, Portugal. I’ll write about all these events, plus the added treat of going on vacation with our friends Bev, Jess and Rory and an added bonus of helping with a meeting in Ponta Delgaga on the island of Sao Miguel in the astonishingly beautiful Azores islands. There are hundreds of pictures to be sorted, stories to be captured and lessons to be reflected upon. There are things coming up that I want to write about. So this little post is the toe back in the water!

As always, the highlight was the people, the community feeling and the learning.