“We’re all embedded journalists now.”

-Me, about 18 minutes ago

I was thinking about how our overseas “work” during the Global War on Terror came home, as it were, to our televisions with the placement of embedded journalists. These were newspeople who climbed into tanks and ran through the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq with the US military. Being embedded meant becoming truly a part of a fighting unit and not just some goofus with a camera standing hundreds of feet away from the action. They were in the thick of it and it made for pretty interesting coverage. Very often, these reporters were up close and personal with the war. Some of them were injured. Some of them died.

But that’s pretty somber so I’m going to change the subject, sort of.

How are we embedded journalists? Easy – imagine yourself at the Carole King/James Taylor “Troubador” tour (oh, how I wish I was there!) rocking along to the sweet jams. You’re not there as a person covering the event, you’re there to enjoy it. But in this age of easy content production, it’d be not hard at all for you to put together a short video of your experience or, at the very least, a nifty little review on your blog or another music website.

Political rallies, monster truck rallies, monster movie screenings, and screen door factory workers’ strikes are all places where we can, by dint of our presence/participation (depending), become a piece of the action. UStream and its ilk allow us to effectively become live coverage of the things that matter to us, like the King/Taylor concerts. :)

Riots in your neighborhood? Head on over there for the exclusive scoop! Alien invasion? Get over to the landing site and get an interview with Krex-Kulab the Galactic Conqueror. New flavor of Ben and Jerry’s premiering across town? Grab a spoon and a Flipcam and get ready to produce some Pulitzer material!

I realize that the tenor of this post has quickly become a mockery of my original intent, which was to point out that it is easy for us to both produce valuable content and be a part of what we’re up to. As it appears, it might actually be too easy to fully embrace the role of a journalist embedded in LIFE. We’ve all seen perfect examples of the vigilance of those who watch the watchers, or rather, who gawk at the gawkers:

Car vs. pedestrian. Crowd gathers. Cell phones come out. As long as one of them dials 911, the rest are free to film and snap photos.

Protesters protesting something. Stand on the edge of the crowd and upload the shot to Facebook.

OK, so I guess that I’m coming down on the side of citizen-journalism-sucks-and-is-a-sad-consequence-of-technology, which I hadn’t expected to do. Oh well. What do you think?

Photo by Flickr user nils!

*** This post is part of the “Blog Every Day Challenge“, which I have undertaken in homage to John Haydon, a captain of social media and inbound marketing for non-profits. A few months back he did the same thing. Granted, all of his posts imparted some kind of value to his readers (and he has many). I’m blogging about the same old stuff. Don’t call it “general interest”, because I think that it goes without saying that humans should generally be interested in what I’m doing. :) ***

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I sent a friend an article by Deepak Chopra earlier today with the note “Read this – it’s a window into what is running through my mind all the time!” Chopra’s article was about the Higgs boson and its implications for billions of religious people the world over. Or at least, that’s what it started out being about. He goes on to talk about different view of quantum mechanics. You know, waves versus discrete states and superposition and all that good stuff that makes blood shoot from your nose if you think about it for too long. At one point, he talks a bit about how consciousness itself is capable (due to the relatively high gravity of the brainpan once you leave Planck space) of collapsing waveforms into observable pieces of reality. Whew.

Instead of the conventional view that consciousness emerges from complex computation among brain neurons, they [the scientists in question] propose that consciousness involves sequences of quantum computations in microtubules inside brain neurons, not between them in the dendrites and synapses. The quantum computations in the brain are also ripples in fundamental spacetime geometry, the most basic level of the universe.

At time’s beginning

that beauty

which polished creation’s mirror

caressed every atom

with a hundred thousand suns.

But this glory

was never witnessed.

When the human eye emerged,

only then was he known.

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I penned the following poem during my sophomore year at Aurora University. Who knows what I was thinking?

A lotta goddamn telephone poles
Stuck in their goddamn telephone holes
Straight up at goddamn ninety degrees
Swaying not much in the goddamn breeze.
-pine trees

Oh that’s right! I was driving around one day in the delivery van for the printing press where I worked and had a moment of blinding clarity. All the telephone poles around me (and there were many) were each a former pine tree, maybe a lodgepole or Douglas fir. I thought about all the streets in all the cities in all the states across the country and realized that we had cut down a LOT of trees to carry our wires.

I was so blown away, I was forced to write that poem. That’s all.

And I know what you’re thinking. “Tim, they’re actually called ‘utility poles’ because they don’t only hold telephone lines.” You know what? You’re right. Shut up.

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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:

…traditional religions with their beliefs in non-material divine beings are in decline…new forms of spirituality have been filling the cultural niches previously occupied by conventional religions. I argue that the forms I document in Dark Green Religion are much more likely to survive than longstanding religions, which involved beliefs in invisible, non-material beings. This is because most contemporary nature spiritualities are sensory (based on what we perceive with our senses, sometimes enhanced by clever gadgets), and thus sensible. They also tend to promote ecologically adaptive behaviors, which enhances the survival prospects of their carriers, and thus their own long-term survival prospects.

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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.

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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).

Never one to limit myself to what others might call reasonable smoothie construction, I often add little flourishes to the “oh my god” smoothie. Today, after biking out to the hills south of San Jose and back again, I built one of these drinks. Here is what happened:

1. Powdered green tea (matcha) along with some chai-style ayurvedic tea masala, a cup of raw walnuts, a stick of cinnamon, a teaspoon of ground nutmeg, and a half teaspoon of Celtic sea salt.

2. 6 ounces of tofu, one and a half teaspoons of cayenne pepper, a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, 15 ounce can of beets.

3. Around/about two and a half cups of spinach.

4. Puree.

Folks, I’ve eaten some VERY strange things in my life (especially before I dropped meat from my diet) but this is beyond a doubt the strangest “oh my god” smoothie and definitely the strangest thing that has ever passed between my gums. I’m working on the last two cups of it right now. It’s light brown, tan really, and it has little flecks of green and purple and white and yellow (not sure where that came from) and red. If there was a monster that only devoured Christmas lights and Van Goghs, this drink would be its…excrement.

On the plus side, the cayenne pepper usually burns my taste buds dead pretty quickly, thus sparing me having to experience the rest of the drink. It’s going to take me a few more minutes to get this all down. I’ll be lucky if I survive the night.

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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.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

Lady on the beach

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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.

The next morning, we drove through something like a redwood forest along the river’s edge listening to Fleet Foxes. The plan was to head out to the mouth of the Russian and then drive down the coastline along Highway 1. There’s more over at my Flickr page if you’re interested. We spent some time on Goat Rock Beach and then hopped in the car to head back to the highway. This is when my car decided to stop functioning correctly.

It sputtered and choked itself silly. We scooted back to the highway and managed to more or less coast down to Bodega Bay (where they filmed The Birds) and into a gas station. I tried a few tricks with the air filter, but to no avail. The car was broken. I tweeted my sadness, asking followers for pity. I got this little beauty from @NJav over in London:

The tow truck arrived and its operator, Dan, strapped my Neon down on the bed. Jackie and I hopped in the cab and we took off for the mechanic, 26 miles away. We explained how we were on a little vacation before she headed back to Denver. Dan asked me if, since I live in San Jose, I was somehow involved with the tech industry. I told him that I was concentrating on malaria. This got him talking.

His first question was whether malaria had made an appearance in California. He pegged it to a report he had read about global warming and the spread of the disease into places it had previously had not been. We spent the next 45 minutes engaged in a supremely interesting conversation with a supremely interesting man. Dan had lived in the area for many years. He was driving the tow truck as part of his retirement. He liked doing it and helping people out.

We talked about his time in the Vietnam War (he didn’t look a day over 50), about the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Jackie’s work in Kenya, my work in Tanzania, venous stints and angioplasty, vegetarianism (Dan hasn’t eaten meat since he was 20), water issues, and the fact that Hitchcock had filmed The Birds right there in Bodega Bay where my Neon came to rest. Dan had spent most of his adult life as a medical engineer. It’s rare for me to meet someone who really understands malaria, and he knew his stuff. At one point, Dan even gave us a wide-ranging history of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease). It was a fun drive through the beautiful countryside. In some way, I felt ultra-connected to the land with him by our side, even in the cab of that big truck. Once we started talking, all my worries about the car melted away.

As we parted ways, Dan expressed his gratitude that there are young people like us trying to make a positive difference in the world. Coming from someone with the kinds of experiences that he had was profoundly meaningful for us. And then he was gone, off to scoop up the next stranded motorist, and to regale them with fantastic stories and penetrating questions.

As I stood in the mechanic’s parking lot awaiting the hideously-expensive estimate, I thought back to the tweets that I had received after I broke down. @NJav’s tongue-in-cheek DM was forgotten, and I recalled this little gem from @Jean Russell/Nurturegirl:

We found Dan.

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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.

This missive, correctly titled, would be the Tanzanian Dispatch of Doom. I suppose that I could be even more specific and title it the ZANZIBAR Dispatch of Doom, since it was written there. Yes, Zanzibar is a real place.

Our trip to Tanzania was preceded by two weeks in London with the entirety of the Faiths Act Fellowship. We did a lot of strategic planning and advocacy training, and also visited a number of local houses of worship in order to gain the “religious literacy” needed to build interfaith coalitions. It was wonderful to finally meet all thirty of my conspirators in our work against malaria deaths. Until London, I had known many of them on paper and through the occasional conference call, so once we all got into the same room, many of us were already fast friends. I have never met a more inspiring and experienced squad of young people.

My team spent the last three weeks in Tanzania, visiting dispensaries (clinics), hospitals, research facilities, churches, mosques, and other interesting spots. We have all completed a short “Primary Health Care” course at the Tanzanian Training Centre for International Health in Ifakara, an amazing school. They are training the doctors and medical officers desperately needed by the health system in this country, and indeed all across sub-Saharan Africa. We visited the first site of the new malaria vaccine trials in Bagamoyo just days after Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, made a stop there.

If there’s one key take-away from our time in Tanzania, it’s that there is an abundance of hope and faith here. Poverty and disease constitute only a portion of life here, not the entirety of it. Muslims and Christians already work together in mixed communities; we’re trying to inspire them to work together for a purpose. In this case, that purpose is the eradication of malaria deaths.

As it stands, I now know more about malaria than I’d care to admit, and my abiding taste for interfaith action and international development is even stronger than before. The Fellows that I am traveling with are outstanding, and I am honored and humbled to work alongside them. Like the teams in Mali and Malawi, we have gathered some amazing stories of faith, perseverance, and hope. We’re in Chicago now for two more weeks of long workshops and strategy sessions to prepare us for our work as Faiths Act Fellows.

Since my appointment to this program, I’ve spent many hours imagining the course that this Fellowship will take. From the beginning of our training, though, I’ve found that all my imaginings are only a sliver of what we plan to accomplish. We are building this program from the ground up, and the sky is the limit.

I’ll check in again once training is finished and I’ve completed my harrowing safari across the Rocky Mountains and settled in San Jose. In the meantime, be sure to eat plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.

As always,

Tim

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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.

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

In my experience, “outposts” can make or break a nonprofit’s web-presence.

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