Pain in Happiness | Happiness in Pain

Sometimes I listen to this podcast from the Meditation Society of Australia. It's actually pretty helpful because each podcast comes in both lecture format and in guided meditation. So, it appeals to both my head and my heart.

Given my post yesterday about the sickness of the world, this podcast REALLY helped me today. One of the themes was about how happiness is not without pain. With Jennifer Hudson deep in my thoughts these days, I am hoping that she will eventually be able to connect to a spiritual place that will allow her to continue to celebrate her life's successes. Even be even more creative and powerful as a result of so much pain. Let's all keep her in our prayers. And let's support her new film...a spiritual story about transformation from what I remember reading the book.

Tears for Jennifer Hudson | Tears for America

I don't know Jennifer but I wept for her today. I, for one, am grateful that Obama took some time out of campaigning to send his thoughts to her and her family. Of course, the anti-Obama folks thinks that he is just trying to get more exposure by doing this. That's just ridiculous. He may not be the president, yet, but he is a national leader and this is a national tragedy that he has to address.

This is not a national tragedy because Jennifer Hudson is a celebrity. This is a national tragedy because it is just one more sign that American society is imploding. I am not the doom and gloom type. I identify as a proud optimist and have supported Obama from the primaries because of his message of hope. I believe hope is a key ingredient for creativity and that creativity makes real change. But change is only possible if we, as a society, recognize that we are sick, why we are sick, and that we need to get better.

Check out what Jared Diamond says about societies collapsing on TED.com For some reason it is not letting me imbed the video here so check out the link.

Arts & Youth Development in Action | Young Men and Mosaics

As I have written and spoken about many times before, youth development is a simple concept to understand but, for some reason, it is very difficult to fully integrate its practices at a program or organizational level. I think it's because it requires that we as adults really look at our own stuff and work through our blocks around what young people are capable of. We have to not be afraid to let them go out there and do real work that has a real effect on the world. At the same time, we have to set very clear boundaries with very high standards for them to operate in. This balance of freedom and structures is hard for us to implement with young people because we often struggle to find this balance in our own lives.

I love when I see dead on examples of what positive youth development really looks like in practice. I often find that the most effective programs are related to arts. And it's not just my bias. Check out this video. It's about a community arts project involving young men creating mosaics in juvenile hall in Baltimore. It runs about 12 minutes...

Book Review | The Creative Family

Glitter & Razz is celebrating Mothers this month with a free gift. I am so excited about this. Anyone who registers for summer camps in the month of May or refers someone who registers will get from us a copy of the book, The Creative Family by Amanda Blake Soule.

Allison and I love this book. So many other "creativity" books for moms, families, and kids relegate "creativity" to the realm of craft and craft alone. This definition of creativity is limiting because it implies that, in order to be creative, one has to know how to sew or be permanently attached to her glue gun.

Don't get me wrong. I love craft projects. I am not surprised by the overwhelming popularity of scrapbooking. At the same time, my work is all about helping kids and the adults who love them understand the amazing power of personal and collective creativity to change the world. And there are so many ways to do this. In addition to crafts, we can nuture our creative energies through storytelling, dance, nature walks, or puzzles. Soule acknowledges the various ways that families can be creative including through everyday activities like bedtime and supper.

We always talk about the importance of a child's imagination. Even Soule's subtitle includes the phrase "how to encourage imagination." But, we rarely talk about how this imagination is the foundation of a full creative life. We also rarely talk about the importance of imagination in our adult lives. What I appreciate most about Soule's book is her openness to share her our creative journey with her children and then with us, the readers. She writes a lot about how her creative spirit has been re-awakened through her explorations with her children. And, she writes about the connections that a creative family life brings; connections to each other as a family, to the greater community, and to the Earth.

See? That's life-changing stuff right there.

This is the perfect book for modern families. Modern families are growing and changing in a world where new ideas are being called upon to solve age-old problems. Our modern families are not simply laying down to go night-night with the same old stories that we were given. We are questioning our role as mega-consumers who are willing to buy the same old messages of Dick and Jane and the prince coming to the princess' rescue. We modern families are actively re-writing new stories that value simplicity, kindness, and celebrate the fact that Jane and Jane and their kids just bought a condo a few doors down. We recognize that we all have our own unique stories to tell and that, by making the space to tell and listen to these new stories, we can all work together to change the world.

Dee Hock and Charodic Theory

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out...Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.

This quote has fascinated me for about a year now. I found it online and never knew who said it. Until today. This morning is was introduced to Dee Hock, the founder of Visa (yes, the credit card company) and his "chaordic" theory about organizations...the notion that healthy, adaptive systems will always exhibit a kind of dynamic tension between chaos and order. It fit in beautifully with the dynamic tension that he'd set up in Visa: encourage as much competition and initiative as possible throughout the organization -- "chaos" -- while building in mechanisms for cooperation -- "order."

There is a great article about him from Fast Company.

What does this have to do with our work as community artists and creative changemakers? A lot, potentially. There are many sectors, not just the corporate sector, who are looking at how to implement Hock's principles and practices into fundamental institutional change. The Fast Company article references Hock's work in the 90's with the Joyce Foundation (Chicago), currently a large funder of community arts.

So, in our field that is supposed to all be about change in a decentralized way, let's take these theories on and figure out what we can clear out in order to make some space for some magic to happen.

The Organized Artist

People praise me for/accuse me of being a big picture thinker. Mainly, I think it's great except that I occasionally/often miss The Details.

Luckily, I am smart enough to get help. If you are an artist/entrepreneur who needs help, I have a recommendation. Call Stefanie Archer and Creating Space for Change Consulting. She will rock your world. Allison and I hired her to help us organize Glitter & Razz and create systems that allow us to get out of our own way. She is in Boston but we worked with her via telephone and the coaching she gave us was life changing.

Yesterday, I had one of the best days of my professional life. It all started with my "creating space" and finally getting to the project of organizing my computer files. I was so excited to have our friend and artist, Teri Stockton, help me for the day as she is someone else who is blessed with the ability to think clearly and logically and understand what should go where.

As I was creating all of the space 2 magical things happened...

1. I was walking down to street to pick up lunch and I was stopped by a neighbor who literally handed me a check for $585 to put her daughter in our summer camp.

2. We received a message from our friends at Kaiser Elementary School (where we did a week-long camp last week) saying that the principal loved what we had done so much with that 1 kindergarten classroom that he wants to receive a proposal from us about how to bring Glitter & Razz to every child in the school next year.

I can't guarantee that working with Stefanie will bring you these exact results, but isn't it worth a try?

Grace with Mean Girls

Because Grace makes beauty out of ugly things
Grace finds beauty in everything
Grace finds goodness in everything
-U2

I have been trying to figure out lately what Grace really means. My usual source of all meaning, Wikipedia, wasn't initially helpful. So, I thought. I learned that Christians believe that Grace is our gift from God. It's how we attain salvation. Did you know this? It's not actually all the good deeds that we do on Earth that gets us into heaven. It's that God says to us, "Whatever you do, it's not gonna be enough anyway. I'm the holy one in this relationship. So, I'll just love you and let you in, regardless of yourself."

That's nice, isn't it?

I wish I had reacted with more Grace today in the class I was teaching. I have a 5th grade student who I have taught for a little while now and, the older she gets, the more attitude she gets. To be plain, she is rude and mean. To me. To other kids. And I have very little patience for her. Normally, I try to keep it together but today I just had it.

We were working on putting together all of their original pieces of choreography into one ensemble dance. It was already a tough process because many of the students were hyper and distracted, interrupting me whenever they felt like it. So, in the middle of it all, my little rude friend decides that she is going to top them all and question every little thing that I said and did; stopping all the action and playing a power game with me.

I said, while the whole rest of the class was watching, "You know what? I am tired of you always arguing with me. I am tired of it and I am done with it. This is over. Sit down."

She was not happy about it. In some ways I feel like I am not the worst teacher in the world because I didn't actually yell or scream. I was calm but I was mad. I don't even think I said anything to shame her in front of her friends.

I just wish I had dealt with her with more Grace. I wish, in future classes, that I can see beyond her rude and mean to her beauty and creativity and humanness. Because, I can't control what she does but I can control what I do.