Hope Springs Eternal (and Everywhere)

I’m just back from a short trip to Beirut to help launch the Awakening the Dreamer work in the beautiful country of Lebanon. I’m moved, delighted and so, so happy to have seen Beirut for myself and felt the incredible warmth of its people.

Beirut has such a tortured history, over centuries of occupation, through a civil war between 1975 and 1990 and bombarded by its southern neighbour, Israel, as recently as 2006. Its difficult for me to imagine what mindset is needed to live within this sense of insecurity. Before I visited, as I skyped with my Lebanese host, the wonderful Rony Mecattaf, there were some loud bangs in the background at his end, “Just fireworks Jon” he quickly interjected.

So last Wednesday Rony had organised a symposium for over one hundred folks, running immediately after a short conference to bring awareness to the environmental movement in Lebanon. This was hosted by BankMed, a local organisation already running a series of projects in their own Happy Planet campaign.  I shared a stage with the Minister for the Environment in Lebanon, just 2 weeks in office and with a budget no larger than the Pachamama Alliance for all that needs to be done in a country where the famous cedars are disappearing and the view of the Mediterranean reveals a yellow haze and unregulated development has allowed an ugly sprawl of buildings out into the countryside.

Some peple had reservations about how ready Lebanon was for the message of change carried in the symposium – and once again the event worked.  I’ve had the privilege now to take this into a whole range of cultures, different countries, varying levels of education and awareness and the symposium continues to do the job, reacing people’s hearts and helping them to choose response-ability and action over denial and distraction.  Rony and myself, plus our wonderful  sister Aline Wauters, a facilitator from Belgium, had the fun of leading the symposium, the first public outing of V-2 anywherein the world.

Over 40 of the 100+ people present want to be further trained by us to help spread the message and of these a dozen beautiful souls were able to join us the very next day for a one-day training.  Outside Beirut, up in the mountains, we were able to help this new group, Dream Green, to step even more fully into an active role as change agents in the world.

And we met wonderful people elsewhere too.  A local Sufi group organised a zikr and invited us to join them.  Here we were introduced to this powerful and very beautiful prayer ceremony in which the word of God is repeated over and over aloud as a means of experiencing the presence of that which is called God, Allah, the Source or Creator. Thank you to Sheikh Wassim and to my new friends, Sirine amongst them, for tis beautiful invitation to see that the divine connects and unites us accross traditions rather than divides.

The Name of Allah

The hospitality I enjoyed, the welcome I felt and the warm hearts of the Lebanese are all saying “come see our country, see our culture, see we are your brothers and sisters.”  I am delighted to do what I can from now to help to bridge these two world, the Anglo-Saxon and the Arab, to overcome and set aside the misunderstandings and division which have bedevilled us and to awaken together into a world which needs us all to collaborate as never before.

 

Ghana Calling

I’ve just got back from an extraordinary trip to Tamale, a town in northern Ghana, taking the Awakening the Dreamer message to the less developed world for the first time.

The trip was made possible by the vision of Mohammed Awal Yakubu, a young Ghanian determined to end the deforestation of the country he was witnessing in his Agricultural Studies.  Of his own initiative he had reached out to the Awakening the Dreamer Iniative and we had supplied him with the means to produce an Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, which he took, by 6 hour taxi ride, right out to the rural communities where the deforestation was a way of life.  You can see more of this story here.

So it was with excitement and some trepidation that I set off to Ghana from South Africa.  Arriving late at Accra I was met by Awal’s brother Hassan and his buddy – they took me to the nearby airport hotel because I needed to be back at the airport early the next morning.  My travel options to get to Tamale were the 75 minute internal flight or a 12 hour journey on the bus, and I can tell you much as the bus would have allowed me wonderful insights into the country and a chance to get to know, I mean really get to know,someone else’s chickens I was up for the flight.  Trouble is I was told in advance I could only buy a ticket at the airport, so I needed to be there 4.30 am to try to get a ticket.

“The flight’s full” was the first response I heard, my heart sank, not only the chicken run but a vital days planning with Awal missed.  “I’d really lke to be on that flight and I am only now arriving in Ghana to buy a ticket” curiously enough seemed to be all I needed to say for the charming check-in lady to decide the flight was no longer full and indeed before 7.30 I was arriving in Tamale to be greeeted by Awal and Torfik, his ever-smiling buddy and fellow change-maker, here are the pair of them with Selima, Awal’s beautiful girlfriend who was also on the team.

Awal, Selima and Torfik

We had a day to plan the final details of the events and for me to look around some of this amazing town, trying to get a feel for the people, the culture and how people live.  One of the beauties of travel is that we get taken to perspectives we’ve never had before, here some of the statistics of the symposium rang true – there were few folk I encountered who could count on running water and a sewage connection and electricity.  We seemed to be exactly where the tarred road ran out and the red dirt road started, the end of western-based lifestyles and the beginning of something simpler and more authentic.  But the modern dream is moving in; this town of devout worshipers (Muslims in this part of Ghana) still beams in US TV, how clear in this context to see the conditioning effect at work, and Vodaphone’s arrival as a mobile phone supplier was heralded by the countless newly red-painted houses and shops, free house paint, free advertising, English colonization in another form 52 years after we were booted out.

The Symposium was a great success, the crowd was somehow smaller than expected but commited, interested and of the 80 or so people, 50 came back the next day for the training.

Africa Beckons – Can You Help?

August will see the Awakening the Dreamer message in Africa, and there will be facilitator trainings in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, the first in each of these countries and the first on the continent. This posting is a request for help, but first let me tell you about the people who have laid the foundations for this;

• Awal, a young guy in Ghana, horrified by the deforestation he sees first hand, contacts us in San Francisco and receives the Presenters Kit so that he can take the Symposium into the very communities where they are chopping the trees.  He has since presented the Symposium to other communities and his fellow students; this visit will allow me to train up some of these folk so that a community of facilitators rises up around Awal.

• Tracy-Kim, a proud South African, resident in Hong Kong and trained there as a facilitator, delivered 7 symposiums in different cities in her homeland during her recent holiday, exciting over 60 people to now want training.  We will be delighted to oblige.

• the other key has been the people in the ATD community world-wide who have brought their connections and contacts in to support the expansion of this message.  That’s how we have a large and enthusiastic group awaiting our arrival in Nigeria, consisting of people already in action through NGOs addressing poverty issues, climate change, children’s rights and more; this ensures we will already be landing amongst friends

As a result of this I will be heading for Africa in just a couple of weeks (schedule below), joined for the South African trainings by my friend and colleague Ruel Walker; it promises to be quite a trip.

So here’s 2 ways you can help today.

1. Please let your friends, contacts and extended communities in Africa know about the events below.  Please invite them all to consider attending one of these events or to contact me to meet during this time.  Another highly valuable resource as you invite people is the Symposium trailer here
2. The other help we need is money.  We are normally able to cover the local costs of events like these with income from symposium attendees and training participants.  But this model simply won’t work in Nigeria and Ghana, where our local contacts impress upon us that any kind of charge, however modest, will exclude lots of people and my budget is overspent just getting the air-tickets to Lagos and Accra.  I’ve been blown away by the generosity already exhibited by friends from Hong Kong, the US, Japan and elsewhere with who’s help we have been able to gather some funds to support the trip to Awal’s home in Tamale, and even to take him a laptop. There is still a need for more funds in each country, which means an opportunity to be one of the people making these trips possible, to help spread awakening in the world.  Please let me know if you would like to help, by emailing me here., any amount will make a difference, perhaps allowing just one more person to hear this message of hope and possibility and to themselves become ambassadors of a new dream for Africa and the world.  All funds will be administered through The Pachamama Alliance, as US-based not-for-profit.

The Itinerary

22 August                 Symposium                           Abuja, Nigeria

23 August                 Facilitator training              Abuja

24 – 26 August         Available for meetings       Abuja and Lagos

27 August                 Symposium                           Cape Town, South Africa

28 – 30 August        Facilitator training              Cape Town

31 August                  Symposium                          Plettenberg Bay

1 – 2 September       Facilitator training              Plettenberg Bay

4 – 6 September      Facilitator training              Johannesburg

9 September            Symposium                           Tamale, Ghana

10 September          Facilitator training              Tamale

Korean Visions

Once again its my pleasure to announce that the symposium has arrived in a new country, this time South Korea. This is our last morning in Seoul before heading home having been here an intense, enjoyable and ultimately hugely successful 6 days.

Day One saw the team assemble, Hide Enomoto arrived from Japan, Sand and I had flown in from the USA, and we were helped enormously by the very professional team at the venue, the Korea Leadership Resort in Anseoung. We ran a symposium for 15 people in a mixture of English and Korean – you can guess that HIde and I contributed the English bit and Helen, one of the participants translated for her compatriots. This pushed the 4 hours version out to 5 but the extra time made for a complete experience for all and the symposium worked its magic once again. How do we know? Because 4 people who hadn’t planned to decided there and then that they wanted to stay for the subsequent Facilitator Training.

That evening and over the next two days we ran a Basic Training for the same 15 people, and by the end of Day Three “Hosanyaksu” had completed the training and named themselves [there is no simple translation for this word, it means a combination of Healing Spring and Hospice Hands, I think].

This wonderful new group includes Kayeon and her two sons Ben and Brian, 16 and 17 respectively and then a large group who work together in the Korea Leadership Center and its associated companies. This last grouping particularly gives the Korean facilitator community a powerful capacity to organise and deliver events, that is their day job with programs like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Indeed it was Ken Gimm, CEO of this company who had the vision to bring the Symposium to Korea after he attended it at the Montreal meeting of the International Coaching Federation last November. Now he envisages the Symposium reaching 15% of Korean’s 48 million population by 2015, so we can expect to hear more from this ambitious new community very soon.

The last couple of days have included press briefings, a company-wide Q & A event, other meetings and time for some sight-seeing, hosted by a number of the wonderful young people from Ken’s companies; thanks particularly to Jun, Eunice, Jay, Jessie and Karen. How we ended up in Korean national dress banging the big drum outside the palace at Deoksugung is another story . . . . .

Awakening Rings Loud in Manila

What a joy it was to visit Manila and witness the birth of another new community of soul brothers and sisters committed to help ring in a new dream for the human family.

And what a pity to visit the Philippines for the first time and be there but 72 hours.  I arrived to a wonderful greeting from the Philippines Tourist Board and was promptly escorted by the helpful and gracious Jo-Jo to a waiting car, and whisked safely off (thanks Vic) to Tagaytay, a volcano within a volcano just south of Manila.  Although an afternoon of site-seeing was on offer all I could do was fall into the hotel bed for a long-postponed sleep.  Hours later I woke up, enjoyed a massage and went back to sleep for another 10 hours.  That was my chance to see something of the country.

Returning the next day to Manila I met with some of Earthwards, stewards for a sustainable world, a newly formed group in Manila who had organised my entire visit: hotel rooms, symposium venues, professional A/V and meeting production staff were all arranged, and funded, so my thanks go to this group for their vision and their generosity.  You can find out more if you find the Earthwards page on Facebook.

The symposium on Saturday afternoon was quite a blast.  There was a full and enthusiastic crowd, lots to eat (remind me never to mix food and symposiums again) and a brown-out half-way through (yep, a black-out in that part of the world is called a brown-out!)  So the second half of the symposium was delivered by yours truly into a gloomy room as our A/V team worked to restore power.  And by a mix of means we got to the desired end-point, a crowd of folk awake and inspired to see what (more) they can do through their own lives to bring about an environmentally sustainable, spiritually-fulfilling and socially just human presence on Earth.

The very next day 18 enthusiastic souls gathered again to train as facilitators, here they are with their message to the world.

Traveler’s Dilemma

So I’ve just returned from a month long,4-country trip taking the Awakening the Dreamer message around South East Asia.  The results are new or enlarged communities of active citizens committed to amplifying this message in Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and the Philippines.  The further ripples from these same folk are already being felt in South Africa, India, Singapore and doubtless other places too.  In the context of our work, awakening the citizens of the world as a an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilled and socially just human presence, this seems quite a result.  But there is always a cost to consider in this, the cost of all this travel.

For the flights alone I have caused 4.41 tonnes of carbon dioxide to be emitted into the upper atmosphere through my 19 866 miles of flying. There are several ways to look at this; one is to consider what an annual carbon ration would be per person, and estimates here are mostly in the range 1.5 – 3.0 tonnes per person – yikes.  Another view posits that if we are to collectively emit no more than 250 billion tonnes of carbon in order to reduce the probability of a 2 °C warming to 25 per cent, then for today’s population we each have only 36 tonnes left that we can ever emit . . . ever!  So I’ve used up 12.25% of my lifetime’s carbon ration in just this one trip.

A couple of questions remain

Is this justifiable? There is no way to answer this objectively, we can only weigh the balance between the value to our long-term future of this process of awakening and linking active citizens and the environmental cost of so doing.  What do you reckon?

Can I offset this environmental damage? Yes is the answer.  In fact one of my flights has already been off-set as a generous donation by Gregers Reimann in Kuala Lumpur – thanks Gregers.  And the work of the Pachamama Alliance helps to preserve nearly 2 million acres of pristine tropical rainforest, a valuable carbon sink as well as the forest home to the Achuar people.

Today as we are ever more acutely aware of the health of our planet home any active that isn’t directly restorative to the environment can be called raise questions for which there are no easy answers. I’ll leave the last words to Seize the Day, a radical British folk band . . . . . and to you, what would you do?

MY Awakening (with Facebook)

Am writing this post rather breathless after a whirlwind 3-day trip to Malaysia and an astounding couple of events in Kuala Lumpur.

June ‘09 is dedicated to supporting the growth of the Awakening community in South East Asia, and this has occasioned a tour of the region. One of the stops was KL where the World’s Greenest Man lives.  Matthias Gelber, who won this acolade in a worldwide search, is also an entrepreneur, the founder of Eco Warriors Malaysia and a trained facilitator for the Awakening the Dreamer symposium.

So you’ll guess that Matthias is a make-it-happen kind of guy, and he was delighted to create both a symposium and then a one-day training in Malaysia this past weekend, and what events they proved to be.  On Friday evening 180 people gathered in the Grand Millennium Hotel (Matthias had exchanged his time as an eco-trainer for use of this venue!!!!).  What followed was the most spirited symposium I have ever been involved in; the crowd was with us, and vocally so, from the outset as Matthias, Jo Fok (remember Jo as the force of nature organising the whole June trip) and I lead the event.  At least three wonderful possibilities emerged; the first was a grouping of the many people there working in the field of education, the second a collection of committed and active young people and thirdly the a group who wanted to attend the Facilitator Training the next day.  The crowd was eventually dispersed (by the cleaners I think) over an hour after the event had formally concluded and it was clear that this first event had been a huge hit.  The people who attended were almost all already active in some way, but as is so often the case, were galvanized into new levels of activity and collaboration by the ATD message.  And, demonstrating a real opportunity for other groups around the world, the crowd had been assembled almost entirely on Facebook (no trees were harmed in the promotion of this event).

And then . . . . . the next day 47 of these people came together to train and form MY Awakening, the first group of facilitators in Malaysia (which is MY for short).  Ranging in age from 13 (is Liam the youngest facilitator in the world?) to much older, speaking Malay, Tamil, Hindi, Cantonese, Danish, German, Spanish, Japanese and English (I probably missed a couple too) this group really represents the diversity of Malaysia and the natural joy and exuberance of its people.  24 hours later there is already a Facebook site, a nominated Youth Officer (Liam’s older brother Stephane) and a series of meetings in the diary.

I left the post-training celebrations in time to get 4 hours sleep and catch the first flight back to HK where we’ve just run another symposium . . . . . but that’s another story, for another post.

What I’m inspired to understand and pass on for other facilitator communities around the world is how tools like Facebook can be used so effectively, and what is it that Matthias is doing that has such a large and willing group ready to mobilise in support of symposiums, tree-plantings or other events. But for now, bravo Matthias and welcome to MY Awakening.

Hong Kong’s Happening

I’ve just arrived here in Hong Kong at the beginning of a 30 day visit to this busy, bustling city and other parts of South East Asia.

The team here have worked really hard to create symposiums at a bunch of places, two universities in mainaland China, the Asia Consciousness Frstival here and Manila and Kuala Lumpur too.  We’re also planning trainings in each of these countries so we hope by the time the month is out to have new teams of facilitators in the Philippines, Malaysia and mainland China – how cool is that.

And here’s what I was writing about the opportunity we have for the region during this period

The Big Opportunity
During this month we can build significant new capacity in the Awakening the Dreamer community here in SE Asia, which means

• train more facilitators to present the symposium and to join the other activities
• take some of these people through the Deepening Training to develop an even greater connection to the work
• help more of the trained facilitators to find their own active role within the activities and possibilities of the region
• to develop materials and tactics to specifically support activities in the region [including translations and local promotional strategies]
• to develop strategies for the continuing development of the Initiative in the different countries and in the region

The target to which we are all committed is to further develop self-generated, self-expanding activity here that is also aligned with the rest of the ATD Initiative around the world.

Better get going, there’s work to do

What’s Going on in Ecuador?

My last post was about the trip to the rain forest but there was a real treat waiting for me in Quito as we left the jungle for our trip home.

On Tuesday I met with 9 of Los Caminantes de la Nueva Tierra, the facilitator group from Ecuador.  17 folk trained together last year, a training that was run in Spanish by trainers from staff here at The Pachamama Alliance and a US-based Chilean (thanks tracy and Anne Marie) since when, to be honest, we haven’t heard much from them.  But in the silence thare has been a real rush of activity including;

• they have run about 30 symposiums for groups up to 400 in size, and also
• they have opportunities to train facilitators inside Ecuadorian universities, not only this but
• they have also run the symposium at the World Social Forum in Brazil and in Chile (that’s another new pin in the map), AND
• they have set up there own beautiful, comprehensive web-site (check it out even if you don’t speak Spanish, that’s not all
• last week they presented the symposium to the Minister for the Environment, she was deeply moved and immediately wants another symposium for her senior civil servants (can you run another event for 200 next week please?) and then for all of the staff of the Department, but even more than this
• they aim to take the symposium to President Rafael Correa by the end of the year

I am moved, impressed, excited and inspired by this example of what we can do when we are committed to bring forth a new dream, when we can give that a focus, when we realise who we are and what capabilities we have and when we look to our right and look to our left to see the beautiful people who we stand alongside.  Together we are a genius and together we are an unstoppable force.

On behalf of facilitators and new dreamers everywhere I salute Los Caminantes, we love you all.

Rainforest Travels

A small party of us just made a visit to the rain forest of Ecuador and to Kapawi Lodge there.  In a trip of just one week we saw the origins of the Pachamama Alliance, met with and meditated in the jungle, swam in the Kapawari river, took plant medicine with a local shaman, explored the customs of the Achuar people and breathed in the life and energy of this remarkable place.

The purpose of the trip was to introduce our partners from Wieden + Kennedy to our work, so that they can use their creative genius and media insight to help us to spread the impact of our work further and faster than ever.  We’re looking to the company that put the swoosh in Nike to help us communicate our messages more succinctly and powerfully in these days of increasing urgency.

So the trip was a guided visit and we had fabulous guides.  Lynne and Bill Twist, who first reponded to the call they heard through their dreams and flew into this remote spot to meet the Achuar nearly 15 years ago.  And Daniel Koupermann the Ecuadorian who first worked with the Achuar to build the eco-lodge at Kapawi.  He told us how he and an Achuar hunter were exploring the rivers to find the right site and they followed a river dolphin into a lagoon.  Not yet convinced that this was the sign they were waiting for they tok plant medicine from the forest and waited for confirmation.  The answer was yes and so today this small lake is home to the lodge, the only indigenous owned and operated lodge of its kind.

Were we successful?  Yes is the answer if we consider the response of our partners who had a life-changing and hugely informative trip, a more considered answer will need to wait on the outcome of their deliberations now, but we’re confident that their expertise in communicating to the heart in simple and powerful ways will deliver some great new ideas – ideas to change the world!

And for everyone of us I’m sure, to sit in this most fertile of places is to feel the power of life, unstoppable and irresistible, it is an opportunity to re-confirm our commitment to do whatever we can to support the work of building a new dream, of peace and justice and sustainable living in the human family everywhere.