Ananda turns 40:  Spiritual village on San Juan Ridge invites public to anniversary celebration

Forty years ago, a small band of people looking for meaning in their lives settled a community on the San Juan Ridge [California, USA] where they could meditate, practice yoga and embark on a spiritual journey.

This weekend, residents of Ananda Village are inviting the public to their retreat on Tyler Foote Road for a three-day celebration of their endurance and growth.

The now-sprawling Ananda Village was the first of seven Ananda communities around the world founded on the principles of world peace among all people.

Urban apartment-type communities have sprouted up across the western U.S. in Palo Alto, Sacramento and Seattle. Outposts in Italy and India are flourishing; another community is being considered in Spain.

But the community on the Ridge “is the mother. There’s just great depth here,” said Corinne Hickey, director of marketing for Ananda Worldwide.

This weekend’s event is an opportunity for the public to visit the gardens of the Crystal Hermitage, learn about permaculture gardening, yoga, meditation and tour the heart of the community, the Expanding Light Ananda Yoga and Meditation Retreat. Read Article

DK Greenroots: Green Social Networking

  This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever be quested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
—Paul Hawken to the Class of 2009, University of Portland

boatsie’s diary :: ::

Someone from Transition California emailed me a link to Paul’s speech Tuesday night while I was researching my diary on green social networking… sheer synchronicity since Paul’s nonprofit WiserEarth is my main squeeze these days. I putter around there passionately, a volunteer editor of their fledgling newsletter, a recently elected member of their first Advisory Council, and a primary promoter of my other pocket of hope ... the Transition Towns Initiatives.

Green Social Networks

Treehugger’s Jaymi Heimbuch, who recently dubbed WiserEarth the ultimate green network, refers to Hawken’s mega-experiment as “the green lovechild of Facebook and LinkedIn”.

Wiser: Build it and they will come

Wiser’s small staff and a dedicated group of volunteers have over the past two years compiled a commercial-free, free-to-use directory of over 100,000 organizations active in working towards ecological sustainability, social justice, indigenous rights, and environmental stewardship.  The community recently chipped in to purchase Wiser’s API, open source software which throws open the window on their organizations, resources, events, and jobs to any website.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. Read Blog Entry

Indian Court Overturns Gay Sex Ban

In a landmark ruling Thursday that could usher in an era of greater freedom for gay men and lesbians in India, New Delhi’s highest court decriminalized homosexuality.

“The inclusiveness that Indian society traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life, is manifest in recognizing a role in society for everyone,” judges of the Delhi High Court wrote in a 105-page decision, India’s first to directly address rights for gay men and lesbians. “Those perceived by the majority as ‘deviants’ or ‘different’ are not on that score excluded or ostracized,” the decision said.

Homosexuality has been illegal in India since 1861, when British rulers codified a law prohibiting “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal.” The law, known as Section 377 of India’s penal code, has long been viewed as an archaic holdover from colonialism by its detractors.

“Clearly, we are all thrilled,” said Anjali Gopalan, the executive director and founder of the Naz Foundation, an AIDS awareness group that sued to have Section 377 changed.

“It is a first major step,” Ms. Gopalan said during a news conference in Delhi, but “there are many more battles.” Read Article

Local Currencies

With local economies flailing, communities across the U.S. are trying to drum up more action on Main Street. “Buy Local” campaigns are one way to go. But many towns—from Ojai, Calif., to Greensboro, N.C.—are considering going a step further and printing money that can only be spent locally.

Issuing an alternative currency is perfectly legal, as long as it is treated as taxable income and consists of paper bills rather than coins. In the U.S., where local currencies were popular during the Depression, the biggest alterna-cash system is in Massachusetts’ Berkshire County. Go to one of several banks there, hand a teller $95 and get back $100 worth of BerkShares, a nice little discount designed to reel in users. BerkShares are printed on special paper (by a local business, naturally—a subsidiary of Crane Paper Co., which has been printing U.S. greenbacks since 1879). And since the program’s inception in 2006, more than $2.5 million in BerkShares have circulated through bakeries, vets’ offices and some 400 other businesses that choose to accept the colorful bills, which feature famous former Berkshire residents, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Norman Rockwell.

What’s the point of all this pretty, community-printed currency? Money spent at locally owned companies tends to create more business for local suppliers, accountants, etc. The New Economics Foundation (NEF), a London think tank, compared the effects of purchasing produce at a supermarket and at a farmer’s market and found that twice the money stayed in a community when folks bought locally. A study of Grand Rapids, Mich., released last fall by consulting firm Civic Economics, concluded that a 10% shift in market share from chain stores to independents would yield 1,600 new jobs and pump $137 million into the area. “Money is like blood,” says NEF researcher David Boyle. Local purchases recirculate it, but patronize mega-chains or online retailers, he says, and “it flows out like a wound.” Read Article

Huston Smith — at 90, still saying ‘yes’ to life’s possibilities

Huston Smith — Bay Area [California] eminence, grand communicator about religion and its mysteries, friend to Huxley, Merton and the Dalai Lama — may be stooped by osteoporosis at age 90. Yes, he rises with studied effort from the chair in his one-room apartment in an assisted living facility in Berkeley. He uses a walker. Life’s physical machinery has grown creaky.

But that is all so beside the point.

“I still have no troubles getting out of bed in the morning: ‘Let me at it!’ ” he says, rubbing his hands together, gleefully, like a child. His eyes sparkle: “Life, let me at you.”

Those eyes, the directness of the gaze; they tell it all. They bespeak mischief, curiosity, bluntness and wonder, attributes that anyone who has spoken to Smith over the years will recognize. In an age of generalized fear and “just say no,” Smith, who taught for years at the University of California-Berkeley, a venerated figure there, has said “yes” to life’s possibilities.

Which probably explains much of his success as the author of 15 books, including The World’s Religions, a report from the front lines of the planet’s major faiths, which helped fuel the American fascination with Eastern religions and has sold about 3 million copies since its publication in 1958.

Bill Moyers once devoted a five-part public television series to Smith’s life and influence. That was in the ‘90s. Now Smith, raised in China, the son of Methodist missionaries, a man with many stories to tell, has a new memoir in which he tells them: Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine (HarperOne). Read Article

Organic Farms as Subdivision Amenities

SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vermont, USA — The bewildered Iowan who converted his farm into a ballpark in “Field of Dreams” in 1989 might reverse the move today. From Vermont to central California, developers are creating subdivisions around organic farms to attract buyers. If you plant it, these developers believe, they will buy.

Increasingly, subdivisions, usually master-planned developments at which buyers buy home sites or raw land, have been treating farms as an amenity. “There are currently at least 200 projects that include agriculture as a key community component,” said Ed McMahon, a senior fellow with the Urban Land Institute.

In 2001, investors in a stalled project with an agriculture component outside Boise, Idaho, recruited Frank Martin to take over their development. Mr. Martin had been a manager at Prairie Crossing, a subdivision built around a working farm in the Chicago suburb of Gray’s Lake.

By 2008, the 1,756-acre Idaho development had repaid a $12 million loan from the financing arm of General Motors; realized a 61 percent premium on the sale of its sites, compared with similar parcels with no farm nearby; and claimed a $2.8 million pretax profit by selling 785 of 800 lots, while keeping 1,000 acres open.

The success of the two developments proved the concept, and like-minded developers around the country are trying it on inactive farmland and even on formerly industrial land. Read Article

U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny

The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition.

Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming. But for the last three decades, their numbers have been declining — to 60,000 today from 180,000 in 1965.

While some nuns say they are grateful that the Vatican is finally paying attention to their dwindling communities, many fear that the real motivation is to reel in American nuns who have reinterpreted their calling for the modern world.

In the last four decades since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns stopped wearing religious habits, left convents to live independently and went into new lines of work: academia and other professions, social and political advocacy and grass-roots organizations that serve the poor or promote spirituality. A few nuns have also been active in organizations that advocate changes in the church like ordaining women and married men as priests.

Some sisters surmise that the Vatican and even some American bishops are trying to shift them back into living in convents, wearing habits or at least identifiable religious garb, ordering their schedules around daily prayers and working primarily in Roman Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals. Read Article

Michael Jackson’s final farewell:  A reminder of mortality in the face of our efforts to avoid it

Letting go of Michael Jackson has felt, for me, like being repeatedly jabbed with a small cattle prod. The jolts have come when I received the friend’s text that told me he was dead, when it was confirmed a few minutes later on Radio 4, and then, a couple of days ago, when I was briefly transfixed by the ghoulish “last picture” on the cover of a celebrity magazine. Just as I was getting used to the idea of him as a corpse, yesterday he reappeared alive on another front page, apparently buzzing with energy as he rehearsed for the never-to-be London shows. That was jolt number four.

It’s not over yet. Reports from California suggest that the Jackson’s family plan is to put his body on display in a glass coffin at Neverland. A 30-car motorcade will transport his remains from LA to the ranch where public viewing could precede a family funeral. Neverland has itself long since fallen into decay, and the image of a superstar who could not grow up, lying dead and surrounded by delapidated fairground attractions but still being peered over by a half-adoring, half-repulsed public, could hardly be more poignant. Jackson was stuck in a childhood so weird he could never complete the developmental path to adulthood, but despite his best efforts, the physical ageing process would not be denied.

Perhaps this is why a decision to display his corpse might feel more shocking. Having preserved himself through surgery, his body was the most visible manifestation of his resistance of the natural stages of life, which must include death. That body, if made public, would be a rude reminder of how all fantasies of immortality meet reality in the end.

It could, however, be a good reminder. As a culture we are largely in denial of death, even to the point of hiding old people in nursing homes. This postpones the day when we must face the reality of our own end, but at the painful cost of resisting the changes of age, not to mention the frightening possibility that people will start to ignore us when we, in our turn, begin to look mortal. Funeral rituals are designed to help us come to terms with a person’s demise, but they also pierce the psychic armour that shields us from genuine realisation of the facts of death. This may be unpleasant in the short term, but the resulting realignment can be life-enhancing – witness those who have near-death experiences and report returning to life with renewed vigour and fearlessness, understanding the freedom that comes from deep understanding of life’s temporariness. Read Article