Month: April 2019

Earth

This was one of those rare years in which Easter and Earth Day kissed each other at midnight. Did you notice? I felt it. I went from writing about and celebrating our eternal nature with my family on Sunday to honoring the precariousness and preciousness of our place in this world at work on Monday. But rather than this feeling like two contradictory days, for me it felt like one long 48 hour celebration of our humanity. It was an opportunity to abide in the Both/And. Yes, we are eternal… and yes, we may well be extinct tomorrow. Somehow, these two realities- the absolute and the relative- are deeply connected. I suspect that the secret to unlocking one lies in the other. We are not accustomed to thinking about it in this way. We tend to think we have to escape the relative (embodied life on earth) to attain the absolute (heaven or a pure state of spirit). But what if the only way to truly know and experience the absolute is through relative experience? Then what?

This article by Thich Nhat Hanh, the originator of the idea of interbeing, beautifully and succinctly captures possibly everything we need to know at this moment in time. I posted this in my FB feed on Earth Day. If you read it, it’s worth a second read. I think I have read it a few times now. If you didn’t get to it, this is your chance! For all others, enjoy!!

https://upliftconnect.com/falling-in-love-with-mother-earth/

My Earth Day started with this article first thing in the morning. It was the perfect centering for a day that I knew was going to be filled with a celebration of the work that our team at Prairie View A&M has been up to over my five years here. We have been working on affordable, net zero energy, resilient infill housing solutions for low-income, minority communities in Houston. The culmination of this work is The Fly Flat project. On Earth Day, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the American Institute of Architects announced that our team won an AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten Student Design Award. The student competition mirrors the COTE Top Ten awards for architect’s built projects. It is the highest honor in sustainable design in our profession in this country. I am humbled by the power of this work and the impact that it is having in the world.

Yet there is a misconception floating around out there about me among those who don’t understand what I am up to. I usually just let this stuff go, but I am learning that sometimes it is helpful to be forthcoming about my intentions and to set the record straight. The misconception is that I am all about the win. It’s easy enough to deduce based on the fact that my students and I have won national competitions for the past five years in a row. The explanation is that I am “competitive” and “ambitious.” Well, sort of, but not really.

I am an athlete, so I most certainly have learned how to compete to win. I have also racked up more than enough wins for one lifetime. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that winning is or has been my overarching reality. I have way more losses in my pocket than wins. It would be an even bigger mistake to think that winning is what motivates me. Win over what??? In my worldview there is only me, myself and I…. extended out to infinity. There is no winning. There is only evolving. And we either evolve together or we devolve together. That’s it.

Yesterday we had a great speaker at our PVAMU Awards Ceremony. Marlon Hall is an anthropologist and artist who talked about the most important thing behind everything that we do in life. And that is- the why. If you know me well enough or have been one of my students I have no doubt tortured you with the 5 why’s game. It’s quite easy if you’d like to try it for yourself. It goes like this. If you want to get to the bottom of something- an emotion, a pattern, a thought, an action, a turn of events, etc.- start with a simple question. Why? Answer the question with whatever knee-jerk reaction that pops up. Then invoke your inner 5 year old to ask why of your why. Repeat 5 times.

Example: 1) Why do you go to work? I go to work in order to get paid. 2) Why do you need to get paid? I need to get paid in order to put a roof over my head and food in my belly. 3) Why do you need a roof over your head and food in your belly? I will die if I don’t have a roof over my head and food to eat! 4) Why will you die? I will die because I will be exposed to the elements, nobody else is going to house me or feed me, and nobody is going to take care of me! 5) Why do you think nobody will take care of you? Because we live in a society that doesn’t believe in taking care of each other. BONUS question 6) Why doesn’t society believe in taking care of each other? Because there isn’t enough to go around and so it’s every man for himself! Survival of the fittest rules the day!!

The 5 why’s gets us to the root cause. For the most part, we continue to play into a society that doesn’t fit our values because we were taught and believe that survival of the fittest is the law of the land. It isn’t. Nature doesn’t actually work that way. Nature cooperates. But I digress. We’ll come back to that at a later date. What I want to uncover here is my why. Why do I show up in the way that I do? Marlon taught us another trick to help us to get to our why. The trick is to come up with a life motto rooted in your why. Your motto should be formatted like this:

Verb

Noun

Preposition

Noun

Before I tell you my motto, let me tell you this. I am here on assignment. We are all here on assignment. That assignment has little to do with winning and everything to do with evolving. I am consciously aware of this in everything that I do. Like Marlon, I encourage everyone I encounter to gain awareness of their own unique why. I believe that your why (yes, YOURS!) is the key to the Universe. So, you want to know why I have won so many competitions over the past five years? It isn’t because I was trying to win. I have much bigger fish to fry. It is because I am trying to save the world. I have always been trying to save the world. Most would think this naive. But I know that I won’t save it alone and that it won’t be saved without me. So I take my assignments seriously and do the absolute best that I can. Now as for that why, here you go:

Hold

Space

For

Oneness

When you see that this is what I am doing, you will understand how I do it. Easter and Earth Day won’t kiss again until 2030. That is the year by which it is believed we need to have fully adjusted the course of humanity, if not sooner. Will we? Will we by then understand enough to know that Easter and Earth Day are two sides of the same coin? If so, there is some chance that we will live to experience them as one day. That day will come in the year 2057. I hope I live to experience that day. I will be 88 years old. What is your why? Let’s go, Earthlings!

Rebirth

Tis the season, no? I certainly feel that way. I have this sense of old patterns being released, opening the door for new possibilities. Pure potential is limitless. Anything can happen. Rebirth feels like that. It’s a blank page on which any story can be written. Rebirth is embedded in life. It’s in every major life transition- change of job, home, partner, social circle, etc. It’s in the midlife crisis. It’s in the realization of a new potential. It’s in the introduction to a new perspective. It’s in a new understanding. As I close this chapter of my life, I find myself staring at a blank page and I feel free. My experience is one of, wait a minute, I am bigger than all of this that I am leaving behind. There is so much more to me. There is more to discover, explore, and throw out into the world just to see what bites. These little rebirths help us to know that things are not set in stone so much as we tend to think they are. Rebirth is the upside of change.

Of course, that implies that there is a downside to change. We call that death. Death is also embedded in life. It’s in every little loss that precedes the rebirth- the loss of your former job, former home, former partner, former social circle, former life as you knew it, former ideas about reality. I’m feeling all of that loss too. I’m not gonna lie- I’m an emotional roller coaster right now. Yet there is something so alive about being in the threshold between old and new. The intensity of the feelings on both sides of the coin are the gift of life itself. In so many ways, just to experience that is what we are here for.

Actually, death is what makes life as we know it possible. In order for life to work, it has to keep moving. Life by definition is constantly metabolizing, which is to say taking in the stuff of life (nutrients, air, water, light, heat, energy, ideas, etc.), chewing it up, incorporating it as it sees fit into itself, and giving the rest back in a form we call death (which in reality is just another name for birth). We are each a pattern of life that persists in spite of these continual interchanges. Every so often, we shift our pattern just enough to feel a rebirth. Then when we are completely done with the pattern that we chose, we give it all back. Emily Levine gave one of the best explanations that I have heard of this before she died, and in part because she is so dang funny. This is worth your time:

In large part I agree with Emily’s worldview. I certainly agree with her grace, gratitude, and sheer awe regarding the cycle of life. I also agree with her willingness to let go and give herself up to the larger forces of life, to what I would call the collective All That Is. I think we cling to self too tightly. That is what this blog is all about, after all. Where I might differ, and I don’t know because she doesn’t address this directly in this TED Talk, is that I also believe that life is fundamentally formed by Consciousness. In other words, I believe that Consciousness exists a priori matter. That is to say that matter (the material world) emerges out of Consciousness- it is a conscious decision. The alternative view is that consciousness only arises out of matter. In this worldview, your consciousness (what you identify as you) only arises out of the pattern of matter (your body) that supports you. When the latter disperses, the former goes too. I would therefore argue that determining which is a priori – matter or consciousness- is the most fundamental choice we each have to make as we try to determine what reality is. Incidentally, neither side has been proven to date. It is therefore up to each of us to decide what we believe, and therefore what is possible.

In quantum terms, I would say that the particle (matter) is a focused manifestation of the wave (energy, the field, pure potential). The thing that does the focusing (manifesting) is Consciousness. What that means to me is that when we are done manifesting a particular pattern of self, we return to the field of pure Consciousness and release the stuff of life for another aspect of Consciousness to do what it will with it. Once there we are both drop (Self/soul) and ocean (God). It may be impossible to establish where Self ends and the rest begins, but we are there nonetheless and we are free to do it (manifest some pattern of self) all over again. I would further argue that we are both drop and ocean all along even though our focusing into a pattern of matter hides that reality from us. All of this is to say that I believe that we are eternal.

Hey…. isn’t that what that Jesus fellow taught? Isn’t that what he demonstrated? Isn’t that what his resurrection was all about? Is it such a stretch to imagine that this sort of adventure is not only available to all of us, but that it is THE Adventure. Incidentally, and for the record, I believe that Jesus was God and that he is therefore eternal. Where I differ from Christianity as it is commonly taught these days is that I happen to believe that you too are God (Consciousness in my worldview). I believe that you are equal to Jesus in every sense. In a nutshell, I believe that there is nothing but God (Consciousness). The only reason that nobody I know can walk on water is that we simply don’t realize who we truly are. Warning: you can try to fake it until you make it, but I’m guessing you might get wet. Just sayin. Jesus knew who he was beyond all shadow of a doubt. He demonstrated to us not just who he is, but who we all are. I believe that he wants us to know and experience our eternal nature for ourselves. But that’s just me. We each have to decide for ourselves. There is no other way to get there than through our own experience… even if we choose to follow a well tread path (which is perfectly fine). So on this Easter weekend what I say to all is: Happy Trails!


Parades and Porches

As an introvert, it’s easy to get the feeling that I am watching from the sidelines. I am and I’m not, but because I keep a low-key profile, it’s easy to feel invisible and expendable. Then again, as I have mentioned before I don’t like being the center of attention so invisibility is often my preferred state. But it is also true that I lowkey want to be connected in a meaningful and impactful way. Time out. Did you just notice my use of the latest lingo??? I’m highkey proud of myself that this near fifty year old can understand what my students are freakin saying half of the freakin time! Of course the rest of the time I lowkey just have to look it up…

Back to my point. It’s easy to think that I could just slip out the back jack and nobody would notice. Of course this is crazy talk. We are about to slip out the back jack of Houston and what is in fact happening is everyone is freaking out. Shannon and I have in a relatively quiet way ingrained ourself into the fabric here. As a case in point, we will momentarily be heading out to our world famous Art Car Parade. This is a huge event in Houston. It would be quite easy to be an anonymous spectator in the crowd. That would be our typical m.o. at such a thing. As for art car folks, let’s just say they are more than a bit flamboyant, which is to say the opposite of us. You wouldn’t expect to find us in that crowd. And yet… there we are. We are personal friends with several of the best of them. We have even been in the Art Car Parade, as we pulled Tiny Drop through a few years ago. Today will be a huge celebration not only of the creativity and hard work that has gone into this year’s entries, but also of the network of relationships that we have cultivated here.

It’s slightly funny, because Houston is like the wild west in which autonomy is everything. Houston’s motto might as well be “Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do.” Actually, the Art Car Parade is one of our better manifestations of that attitude. And yet, in this extreme quest to be different, to be unrestrained, to be free, what has in fact developed is this intense sense of community. It’s surprising, actually, that such a deep connectivity can be found in this place. Mind you, you have to work for it. But some people do. And I suppose, in a way, that makes it feel more special. There is a paradox of course in all of this. My ACIM (A Course in Miracles) lesson for today says in part this (which I am interpreting for my own digestibility):

“All things we perceive are upside down until we listen to the Voice for God (the non-reductionist all-knowingness of the All that Is). It seems that we will gain autonomy but by our striving to be separate, and that our independence from the rest of God’s creation (all of existence) is the way in which salvation (freedom, joy, enlightenment) is obtained. Yet all we find is sickness, suffering and loss and death. (In truth,) to join with His (the will of the All That Is) is to find our own (will, creativity, freedom).”

Let me explain. This is to say that we find freedom not by seeking independence, but rather by celebrating and cultivating our inherent interdependence. If this seems counterintuitive, think of it this way: love = connection. And there is nothing more free than the pure state of Love.

This weekend I am feeling the love. Also at this very moment the Department of Energy Race to Zero Competition is taking place at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado. My students and I have been a fixture at this competition for the last five years. We have been not so lowkey celebrities at this event having been two time champions. It’s a fierce world-class competition, but you know what… more than that it is a place in which both my students and I have developed some world-class, life-long friendships and colleagues. My two closest academic colleagues, collaborators, and really great friends who make me so happy every time I talk to them, Mary Rogero from Miami University and Jonathan Bean from Arizona, are there right now competing with their students. My students and I are not there this year, for reasons I won’t explain. Mary and Jonathan have been emphatic over the last few weeks that they wish I was going to be there and that they are going to miss me. And I know they are not alone in that. I, for one, am also missing what has become for me a great celebration of generations of people coming together to work for humanity’s salvation. Godspeed to all of those “competing” right now. I know that regardless of whether or not they walk away with a trophy, they will walk away knowing that the work that they are doing in the world is priceless.

Well that was yesterday. The brief update is that this morning Mary’s teams won first place in one division and a best undergrad project in another. My day stated with a huge smile for her and her students! That, and the fact that both she and Jonathan texted me to tell me that they could see the influence of our grand winning project from last year in many of this year’s projects. It’s not often that we get to see the impact of the work that we do. It’s especially rare to get to see it rippling out across the universe. My typical m.o. is to gloss over such things. Not today. Today, I am standing in the grace of the power of our interbeingness.

Last but not least, here is my porch story. Remember my close friends and colleagues who I left behind up at school a few weeks ago because I needed to go home for some self care? One of them is Kathleen English and another Amanda Tullos. Amanda, Kathleen, and her husband Steve Setlzer, have been the core of our green team in Houston. They are all architects, incidentally. We have had a tradition of a monthly brunch on the porch for awhile now. Today was our last brunch on the porch before we go. I so love these people. I love them for their bravery in the face of a city that doesn’t really want to change its ways. I love them for the integrity that they bring to all that they do. I love them for how much they care even though it hurts. I love them for how freakin smart they are in navigating through all landmines toward a viable future. I love them for telling it like it is. I love them for understanding that nothing matters without the cultivation of deep interconnectivity between us. I love them for the love and support that they have given me. I love them for believing in me and standing by me no matter what. I know that this is not goodbye. But it is most certainly a moment to stop and be grateful for all of the parades and porches that have bound us together in love.

Stories & Fields

We all have our stories. You know, the story about how a particular turn of events went down, which when strung together with all the rest forms the story of our life. The stories that play over and over and over again in our heads ad nauseam. Yes, I have such things. For most of my life, my stories never made it out of my head. Yet life has a way of calling us out, pulling at us, pushing on us, driving us nuts until we surrender. At least that’s how it’s been for me. There were little toe dips in the deep end in early adulthood, but any (near) complete gushing out would have to wait until much later- and even then only to a trusted few. Not that I wasn’t practicing my storytelling in the meantime, because boy was I!

One of the interesting things about stories is how compelling they are. So much so, that it would be accurate to say that we are our stories. Or more accurately, our stories are who we perceive ourselves to be. Our story is our identity. There is nothing wrong with this per se, in fact one might argue that it is a condition of being human. The same is true, in fact, for an entire group of people. Our collective story is what we call culture. It’s a bit hard to imagine living either without our own story or without a culture, nor am I sure we would want to. Our stories are how we make sense of things, how we connect the dots, how we do the most important thing that we do- to connect. To connect is to love. So from this perspective, I say by all means… tell your story.

Sharing my stories has proven extraordinarily helpful in my own personal evolution. One of the reasons is that the simple act of saying it out loud helps to bring whatever energy or patterns that a story is carrying out of the subconscious realm and into the conscious realm. Another is that sharing it with another can help bring clarity to the experience, regardless of the other person’s response or maybe sometimes because of it. Most importantly, sharing enables us to do that all important thing- connect. We find out that our experiences aren’t so outlandish, or then again maybe they are, but still not so much that it makes you seem like an alien being. Telling our story is crucial.

To not gloss over my first point about bringing the story to the conscious realm, this is what enables us to examine the energy and patterns that otherwise dominate our continued experience of life. One of the main realizations as we do this is that our personal stories have been to a large degree predetermined by the cultural story that we were born into. Maybe that is a great story, maybe not so much. Either way, what is gained by bringing it to light is your own creative powers. When we gain control over our own story, we get to write anything we want. Who wouldn’t want that??

All that is a lead up to where I find myself these days after a good fifteen years of intense storytelling, which is… tired of it. I’m tired of my same old stories. I mean really, how many dang times can you watch the same dang movie or read the same dang book?! Good grief. Enough already. There was a time when the energy of these stories demanded to be told and to be heard. Now… not so much. If you want to know these days you are more likely to get a yawn out of me! I don’t think that one situation is better than the other, just that each should have its day. I’ve already talked about why the former is important, so let’s talk about this new one.

I am actually feeling a little excited about this turn of events. My intuition is telling me that what it means is that I am ready for a new experience. It is signaling to me that actually, I am under no obligation to remain trapped in the past. Sure, my story to date has set deep patterns in my being that will likely always remain familiar to me. But all the same, I can create new patterns. I can tell new stories. I can tell whatever story I want to tell. That is my divine right. I can even tell a different story about things in the past! Think about it. We are required to edit the world as we are taking it in. Our senses simply cannot process everything that is happening. Once something is in the past, we edit even more to make sense of it, to fit it into our one, neat story of self.

The problem lies in the fact that we forget we are editing. We forget that our perspective is grossly limited in the first place. We are always only seeing an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the whole picture. Yet we have convinced ourselves that we are seeing with perfect clarity. One of the reasons that it is so important to share our stories out loud is to help both ourselves and others to gain a more complete picture of events. Of course, that only happens for us if we listen with an open mind, recognizing that there are infinite more perspectives of any turn of events. I had an interesting experience recently that brought to light that one of my ingrained stories was leaving out a whole heap of my childhood experience. This was my gymnastics story. Gymnastics set up a significant portion of my worldview, including challenges, approaches, patterns, etc. It wasn’t that my story was incorrect. It’s just that it was, well, edited. What was left out was practically all of the joy, the fun, the good times. Those stories didn’t make the edit. They only came out during my recent gymnastics team reunion. I either hadn’t told, hadn’t thought of, or had forgotten altogether some of these stories. And the fact that I had is as significant as what I had elevated to being important enough to be included in my official storyline.

You see for the book to make sense, one chapter has to flow from the next. That means that my story was going to be about trials and tribulations rather than about joy and celebration. Ugh. No wonder I am tired of my stories! And it’s not that I have to start completely over. There is some really great stuff in my book so far. Trials and tribulation, yes, but also triumph for sure. Challenging, yes, but also mystical, miraculous, and mind-blowing. I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. It has been exactly what it needed to be to tell the story that I am here to tell. It’s just that maybe I need to keep working on it. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick with my edits. The truth is, I have no idea what the ending will be. I don’t know the path ahead even. I don’t know what my experience will be, what it will mean, or who it will touch. There is nothing but unknown ahead. And that’s cool. It wouldn’t be possible, though, if I hadn’t already exhausted the old stories.

This leads me to what has been in my awareness over the last couple of weeks. There is a direct link between our stories and the field that we are creating around us. You’ve probably heard about this phenomenon through concepts like we attract what we are thinking/being, we see what we expect to see, we get what we expect to get, etc. It’s all of that Law of Attraction stuff. Perhaps you’ve tried that out. Maybe you’ve had success with it, maybe not. Either way, I think the key is that it’s not just about the stories we are telling ourselves, it’s about the field that we are creating because of it. We could religiously repeat the story we are wanting to experience in our head and police any deviation from said story in our thoughts/words/actions. But I dare say that if we are working that hard at it, we aren’t really believing it. We are trying too hard. And the Field knows. We can’t hide the truth from the Field. It knows how we really feel. And besides, this overworking reveals an underlying attachment to an outcome that the Field may or may not deem to be in the best interest of our story. So we are likely to be disappointed.

So instead of trying to manifest a certain reality, these days I find myself just trying to focus on my field. What story is playing in my head from moment to moment and what sort of field is that creating around me? You get this field thing, right? It’s your personal energy field, which is inextricably and profoundly connected to the Field (everyone’s and everything’s field in totality). Really, when we think about it, the ultimate goal- at least, o.k., what I think about it- is to just be in a state of interbeing with the Field. To me, nothing really matters beyond that. Whatever happens, happens. So what? To me, this state of interbeing is joy, is love, is enlightenment. That is consistent with what the wisdom traditions say. What more could we want? I think it is important to say that this in no way rules out experience itself. It simply opens experience to a potential greater than anything we could imagine on our own. And that is really cool.

Now to be completely real about this. That just made it sound way easier than it is, or at least than I find it to be. As I am going about trying to bring awareness to my field, I am finding that it isn’t all that great these days. It certainly isn’t where I would like it to be or on par with where I know it could be based on past experiences. And I know that my experience is being subdued because of it. This week one of my students asked me gleefully how I was doing before class started. I answered honestly. “I am o.k.” He immediately shot back “Why just o.k.???” Mind you, this was one of my Ecology & Man students and they perhaps tend to think of me as their guru. Trust me, I am no guru! Nor do I aspire to be, nor do I want anyone to think of me that way ever. So an honest answer he got. I replied, “Well, that is a great question. What I am working on these days is trying to be aware of the field that I am creating, and I am noticing that I am not always doing such a great job with that. So I am working on it, but for the moment I am not doing such a great job with that!” “Oh!” he replied, “that makes sense.” “How are YOU doing?” I asked. “Stupendous!” he exclaims. “That’s great! I am so happy to hear that,” I reflect back to him. Good. So good.

This student just happens to be a quiet football player, who doesn’t say much in class, and who just days before had pulled his hamstring which was going to set him back a few weeks. I have been talking to him lately about his personal experience in football and how it has defined him for his “story of self” project for the class. The class before I had chatted with him afterward about his injury and encouraged him to give it time and space to heal. I would like to think that just the fact that he had been heard and seen and not simply dismissed for a dumb jock led him to this moment of sincerely asking me how I was doing. And, I think he appreciated my honesty in return. I think it helped him to see that I am human just like him. This is how our stories connect us. This is how we weave our collective story. And, I believe, this is how we will change our field of possibility. This is how we will create a viable future for humanity- one story at a time. The trick is to not get so caught up in the story that we don’t notice the field that it is creating. In short, I am thinking that my best bet is to focus on my field first, from moment to moment, and just let my story tell itself. We’ll see how it goes!