writings

Losing old gods, finding nature

Posted at January 26, 2010

I recently headed back to Colorado for a wonderful weekend of R&R with my girlfriend and her family. We went skiing at Crested Butte, an absolutely amazing mountain way out in the center of the state. Here’s what happens when I ski:

1. I fall down. This happens a handful of times. During this particular trip, I managed to stay vertical 95% of the day, even completing a blue square run without dropping.

2. I come closer to completion. Allow me to explain: When I’m sliding down the side of a mountain fast as hell, staring out into the distance where other peaks look back at me, feeling the warmth of the sun and listening to the whoosh of air past my ears, I really do find a little slice of heaven.

I’m guessing that this is a not-too-foreign experience for those familiar to strapping slippery boards to their feet and shooting down a hill. I relish these moments as I coast towards the base of the mountain. I use religious language to describe these times. Increasingly, I am not alone.

Bron Taylor’s “Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality, and the Planetary Future” describes the “replacement” or at least supplementation of traditional religions by more sensory forms of spirituality. I want to read this book. I grew up around trees and I feel a very deep connection to nature. Here’s a very important piece of an interview with Bron Taylor on Religion Dispatches:

feelings, writings

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Sea Glass

Posted at October 31, 2009

Sea glass
Smooth
sand makin blunt what can cut
no edge to cut
you with
this shit is clear and blue and green and brown
in triangles and nodules and squares and shapes
made by:
drunks on a dock
kids with Coke problems
cruise ships going under
Crusoe lost again or
Sting
I can’t explain the attraction – sea glass doesn’t
catch light or
let you see through it or
help you in a bar fight
It’s
blunt and cloudy and beautiful and old
and smooth
I find sharp pieces and recommit them to the rolling tides for my children.

Most horrifying thing I’ve ever eaten

Posted at October 16, 2009

I couldn't even bring myself to post a picture

For at least the past two years I have had the habit of creating what I like to call the “oh my god” smoothie. Its name comes from the phrase that usually escapes my lips when I taste what I have created. This is a drink that I make with my Breville IKON blender that I consume after long bike rides or awesome workout sessions. It has two basic ingredients: leaf spinach and beets (which are, sadly, usually canned).

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La Figlia che Piange – T.S. Eliot

Posted at October 2, 2009

O quam te memorem virgo…

STAND on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

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Unexpected places and surprise finds

Posted at October 1, 2009

California coastline – like a painting

Jackie and I decided to spend her last two days with me going on an actual vacation. After spending a summer apart (she in Kenya, me in other parts of Kenya, Tanzania, London, Chicago, Denver, etc.), it seemed natural to want to relax. We cruised up to Sonoma for their Vintage Festival, tasted some wines, visited the vineyards, and stayed in a beautiful little place along the Russian River.

feelings, writings

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The Denver Dispatch of Doom – Vol. 12 (Tanzania edition)

Posted at September 8, 2009

Every six weeks or so, I hammer out a message to a handful of my friends to update them on my doings. This is the latest installment.

Hello all,

I hope this letter finds you healthy and happy. The more that I think about the duck-billed platypus, the less I understand it.

feelings, writings

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From: Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Frank Barry, Guest Post: 4 Keys to Building a Successful Nonprofit Web Site

Posted at July 13, 2009

I especially liked #4, which is one of the things that I’m proud to have helped The 1010 Project with:

4) Make Yourself Easy to Find on the Social Web

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (know about the new nonprofit call to action), LinkedIn and Flickr are becoming exceedingly important to any nonprofits online presence. It’s likely your organization is already using one or more of these social networks to engage with supporters, spread your message or raise money. Chris Brogan likes to call these places “outposts”. Your main website should highlight your presence on these sites so that your readers can connect with you in social ways online – they want to get to know you and they want to see that you are doing creative things in fundraising.

nonprofit, social media, writings

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Kenya Series – Mt. Longonot

Posted at July 6, 2009

A fantastic slide show, complete with funny captions, follows this post.

Our team from The 1010 Project spent a few days visiting with a partner in Western Province, then headed to Lake Naivasha in the Central Highlands of Kenya. Naivasha is big and beautiful – it’s in the bottom of the Great Rift Valley – and the entire area is covered by flower farms. Apparently Kenyan roses have a huge market in Europe. The lake has hippos and monkeys and storks and whatnot, but I wasn’t all that interested in such beasts. My goal was to climb Mt. Longonot, an extinct volcano about 20 kilometers from the lake.

I recruited The 1010 Project’s Development Coordinator Emily Ruppel and we planned the trip. Before long, word had spread that we were going to be awesome. Our team grew. Our buddy Josh came along, as did two people from Northside Christian Church in Houston, Texas. The Houston team was traveling with us for part of the journey, visiting our partners in Nairobi and Vihiga. Aldo and Pastor Dave would be joining us on the climb.

We started a bit late on Friday morning because we had some difficulty finding cheap transportation. By about 9:45 am, we were ready to start what by all estimates was a four-hour climb. It’s actually only 630 meters (2000+ feet) from the base to the top of the crater, so we weren’t entirely certain what to expect; I had (unlike most other outdoor things) done scant research on our climb. As it turns out, that 630 meters is fairly strenuous because it’s NEARLY ENTIRELY VERTICAL. There is only one path up the side of this monster volcano, and it is S-T-E-E-P, let me tell you. Further complicating our climb was the omnipresent dust. It’s all super-old volcanic ash and such, so the minute you put your fit in it, you sink two inches. It was like climbing in sand – my legs were getting beaten up.

Pastor Dave, a young man in our minds, was still about a decade and a half older than the oldest of us, and as we climbed, he grew increasingly short of breath. After one particularly grueling section, we took a break and he mused that he would likely not be able to reach the summit with us. At that point, we were close enough to where the rim of the crater was within another two or three strong drives. We told Dave that he could definitely make it, and that we weren’t that far from the top. It was like a motivational speech or something.

Well, Dave cowboyed up and as we crested the top and stared down into the crater of a MASSIVE EXTINCT VOLCANO IN THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY IN KENYA, Dave collapsed to his knees and let out an “Oh my…” The view was amazing – on the one side we were looking back over the Rift Valley and its endless expansiveness. On the other side, we were looking into a giant crater full of forest. It was amazing. The photos following this post cannot do it justice. Dave thanked us for inspiring him to go those last few hundred feet and we walked around the rim for an hour before heading down. If the climb was tough, the descent was pure awesome. We ran down large sections, kicking up massive dustclouds as we went. In fact, the powder was so fine that we were even able to “dirt ski,” as it were:

feelings, kenya, writings

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JAMBO – Kenya Living

Posted at June 17, 2009

Hello all. I feel strange for not being able to blog this excursion up, but my connections have been a bit slow. Oh well. It’s nice to be able to touch base here.

I’m sure I’ll tweet this when we hit the road again, but if I had two words to describe the Kenyan countryside, they would be: “carelessly verdant.” Seriously, everything is either a strange mass of strange trees or a field of plants. Lots of farmers around here. We drove out to Western Kenya last week, almost to Lake Victoria, and slept under bed nets in an orphanage where one of our partners works.

In case you don’t know, I’m here with The 1010 Project, a Denver-based humanitarian organization that partners with social entrepreneurs in the developing world to break the cycle of poverty. Aside from two organizations that are based in the rural west, we have a number scattered across the slums of Nairobi. I’ll be heading to Korogocho and Kibera and Kayole and Matopeni in the coming days.

It’s amazing here, it really is, and I’m super-glad to be with The 1010 Project. I’m our Fundraising Coordinator, and part of our trip involves me implementing a grant that I wrote a few months back. Our partners are VERY happy to work with us on some specific income-generating projects.

Some highlights: Helped a 4 year old Luhya girl carry a 20-liter jerrycan of water through a cornfield to her home. She smiled. I addressed a crowd of what looked to be 40,000 street children in Matopeni, singing songs and dancing and telling stories. I thanked a baboon for laying the groundwork for the internet and Twitter. Got bit by a mosquito, which means a LOT more here than it does in America (check out previous posts, which I can’t link to now, about my work with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation).

I’m likely to spend the first week of July writing a bunch of impassioned posts about these and other things and putting them up, but for now, I just wanted to check in and thank you all for following along with my work. You folks are a big part of the work I do – I see it in the congratulatory tweets as much as I see it in the smiling faces of orphans and entrepreneurs that we work with in Kenya. See you all soon.

Why I Like Sci-Fi

Posted at May 29, 2009

Found a neat little clip from Babylon 5 (you might remember it from back in the day – “our last, best hope for peace”) while ignoring my final for Modern Islamic Political Theory. I think it’s a great reminder of how diverse and interesting our planet is: