Awakin Calls

Beauty lies in details. To notice it, you have to be paying attention. In a world that's enamored by speed and information, it's easy to drown out the eternal rhythms upon which our daily lives turn. This Spring, everyday individuals across the globe are embarking on a 21-Day Reverence Challenge, as an experiment in tuning back into the profound beauty and mystery of being here, and being human.

In this Awakin Call, we'll hear ripples from micro-moments of reverence that have transpired throughout the challenge. This is a participatory call, and we encourage reflections and stories from your experiences.

It all began with a family in Japan and their remarkable visions for peace. Every year, at the foot of Mount Fuji, thousands of people gather for their interfaith "Symphony of Peace Prayers" that unites hearts in a shared intention of peace on Earth. This year, they're activating the Soul of WoMen in a call for communities across the globe to more deeply engage the qualities of nurturing love, compassion, cooperation and beyond -- and have joined forces with KindSpring's 21-day challenges portal, which invites individuals and groups to grow in values that help create positive change. Irrespective of profession, age, culture or geography, when we commit to cultivating certain values we unleash a ripple effect that has the power to transform our lives and the world for the better. When we consistently practice these values together, our efforts encourage and reinforce each other in remarkable ways.

On May 14th, we will invite everyone -- and challenge participants -- to share reflections from their lenses of reverence. Join us to listen to a rich array of experiences, and to share your own!

Ann Sieben, the "Winter Pilgrim," has been a life-dedicated mendicant pilgrim since 2007.  A mendicant pilgrim is one who travels on foot along ancient paths to significant destinations. She carries nothing of material value; no money, cell phone, camera, GPS unit, nothing anyone would be tempted to steal. Her pilgrim days are divided in two parts.  One part is communing with nature, sensitive to the world surrounding her, as she walks village to village. The other part is communing with humanity; engaging with people and their communities to take care of her basic needs, like food and shelter. In these daily acts she is actively building trust in the world which is the foundation of peace.

A recent news article sums up, "The 52-year-old gave up a career in nuclear engineering to take long journeys on foot to holy destinations. In the 9 years that she's been a pilgrim, she has walked in 44 countries."

Ann began her journey as a touristic pilgrim with a taste for adventure.  Slowly, she evolved into a spiritual pilgrim when she began to rely on humanity more and more.  “Over the pilgrimages,” she says, “I went from the spiritual side, the Catholic side, not being very important, to now where the Catholic side is very important. The adventure part, it's there and it's fun, it is adventurous to cross through a river and see a crocodile, but the meaning of the pilgrimages has become Catholic.”  "As a Catholic person I have faith in God, of course," she says, "but to have faith in humanity — it was a beautiful transition."

Ultimately, she progressed further, becoming a servant pilgrim -- one who serves humanity not only by loving her neighbor as herself, but also by actively loving her enemies as well, and thereby building trust and establishing peace.  As she beautifully recounts, "I have been with narco-traffickers in the Mexican desert; religious extremists in North Africa and elsewhere; Marxists in high country of Peru; wife beaters and family abusers in many different countries. They’ve all hosted me for an evening.  For those nights, those moments, those evenings, there was peace."

Amid connecting and building trust with faces of humanity in all languages, skin tones, and cultures, Ann's pilgrimages cultivate not only a faith in the human spirit, but also, an inner resilience and humility. Part of this search manifests in her not carrying money. She reflects, “To go with no money is just a whole different experience, to build trust, the trust when somebody invites you into their home. That trust is the foundation of peace. So that's very important for me. To fall back into the arms of humanity and know that somebody will catch you and no harm will come to you. That's what I do as a pilgrim.”

In her most recent pilgrimage, she left Denver, Colorado (her base when she's in the U.S. and not on a pilgrimage) in November to trek more than 2,000 miles, from Colorado to the Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec, Canada by Easter this past March. With little more than the clothes on her back, including her bright green jacket for visibility, she walks with a handful of items in a small pack, and has received the countless hospitality of strangers-turned-family.

“People are good,” she reminds us. “It's universal, simple, fundamental."

Join us on May 7th, for an illuminating conversation with Ann.

Phil Borges is an artist, activist and filmmaker who uses photography and film for storytelling. For over twenty-five years he has been documenting indigenous and tribal cultures, striving to create an understanding of the challenges they face. His work is exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide and his award winning books, which have been published in four languages, include Enduring Spirit, Women Empowered, Tibetan Portrait, and Tibet: Culture on the Edge. He has hosted television documentaries on indigenous cultures for Discovery and National Geographic channels. Phil also lectures and teaches internationally.

Phil’s recent project, CRAZYWISE, explores his lifelong interest in the relevance of Shamanic traditional practices and beliefs to those of us living in the modern world. The documentary CRAZYWISE reveals a paradigm shift that’s challenging the way Western culture defines and treats “mental illness” and highlights a survivor-led movement demanding more choices from a mental health care system in crisis. The film explores cultural differences with respect to consciousness, mental health and the relevance of Shamanic traditional practices and beliefs to those of us living in the modern world. When a young person experiences a frightening break from reality, Western experts usually label it a “first-episode psychosis,” while many psychologists and indigenous cultures define it as a “spiritual awakening”.

In various indigenous cultures throughout the world, Phil has met individuals who enter non-ordinary states of consciousness to heal disease, predict or influence events, and guide their communities—the people we refer to as Shamans. “I found that almost every indigenous or tribal group I visited had these ‘Shaman’,” Phil has said. “What intrigued me the most was the majority had a similar story when I asked how they came into their unique role. Almost every one, from Thupten Ngodrup to the last Shaman I photographed and interviewed in Pakistan years later, had an episode in their teens or adolescence that would have been diagnosed as a psychotic episode or schizophrenia in my culture. Instead they were typically taken aside by an older shaman or grandparent and told they had a gift and taught how to manage their altered consciousness and become a valued member of their community. It is this dramatic cultural difference in the framing of a fairly common human experience that has led me to revisit and continue to explore shamanism, non-ordinary states of consciousness and psychotic episodes.”

Phil’s program Stirring the Fire uses film and photography to explore what he calls humanity’s “most universal human rights violation”—the discrimination and oppression of women and girls. Phil has produced several short documentaries, a book and an exhibition highlighting some of the extraordinary women worldwide who are breaking through gender barriers and conventions in order to enhance the well-being of their communities.

In 2000 Phil founded Bridges to Understanding, an online classroom program that connects youth worldwide through digital storytelling in order to enhance cross-cultural understanding and help build a sense of global citizenship in youth. He also co-founded Blue Earth Alliance, a nonprofit organization that sponsors photographic projects focusing on endangered cultures and threatened environments.

Phil has partnered with like-minded organizations that address social and cultural issues worldwide for the past 25 years. Working with NGO’s like Amnesty International, UN Women, CARE, and the International Campaign for Tibet he has managed to make a living while doing the work that is important to him.

Sandy Wiggins works at the intersection of three movements – green building, new economies, and thriving resilient communities. He is co-founder and principal of Consilience, LLC, a national consultancy with a mission to build environmentally, socially and economically sustainable buildings and communities. His skillful facilitation has helped birth sustainable master plans for municipalities and institutional campuses as well as sustainable regional public policy initiatives. During his three-decade career in the real estate industry, he has led the development and construction of projects totaling over one billion dollars. He is Past Chair of the U.S. Green Building Council, Founding Chair of the Green Building Certification Institute, a co-author of LEED for Neighborhood Development and served on the LEED 2009 Executive Committee. Sandy’s vision and leadership have been responsible for the development of over forty LEED commercial projects and the nation’s first LEED Gold certified homes, which were also net zero energy consumers.

As Sandy has described, “Most of my professional life was spent in the real estate industry. Through a series of very synchronistic events, I had a personal epiphany about 20 years ago, and woke up to the mess that we're in, and began understand the part I was playing in that, and began to redirect my efforts to try to change that. . . . I ultimately ended up as chairman of US Green Building Council and was very involved in helping to move LEED out into the marketplace. And my professional life evolved so that I was able to work on projects that I felt were really setting the bar for the rest of the world. And I continue to do that to this day.”

His work in the real estate industry led him to work in rethinking finance, because he found that people often wanted to do the right thing but felt financially constrained in doing so. “I began to think about the way the capital moves in the current financial system, what I'll call ‘the pig in the pipe.’ It was really stopping so much that needed to happen from happening. Eventually, that became another avocation and I set out to see what I could do about that. I spent a number of years trying to launch a ‘green bank,’ a triple bottom line, regulated, commercial bank whose focus was to redirect the flow of capital toward a sustainable world. We weren't able to get that enterprise off the ground; it was just bad timing. But through that process, I was able to connect with a whole other amazing emergent network of people in the financial industry and what many call the New Economy. So that's another world I began to operate in. And I continue to operate in that space today as Senior Adviser to RSF Social Finance as part of what they call their field-building collaborative, where our job is to see what we can do to catalyze the emergence of a different kind of financial system.”

As his own awareness grew, Sandy “became convinced that building vibrant, living local economies that were operating very differently from the way our current global economy works were critical to creating a sustainable future.” He joined and became Chair of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), while continuing as a Senior Advisor to RSF Social Finance and as a Director of RSF’s Social Innovation Fund.

“I continue to have a foot in all these different worlds,” Sandy says, “and one of the things I find incredibly exciting and energizing and a place where I see incredible effectiveness emerging is at the intersection of those worlds. The common element that I've kind of divined in what appears to be different domains is a process of what I can only call awakening. The individuals who are engaged in all these activities--whether they're at the bleeding edge of sustainable communities and green building, whether they're leading the charge for the new economy or building vibrant living local economies...all of these individuals are on a journey of awakening, and I mean that in the deepest sense of the word.”

Join us to hear from this remarkable individual, who has been a catalyst and leader in so many areas of social impact and transformation!

Jane Baldwin is an American photographer and educator who gives voice to people on the verge of displacement from their ancestral land and loss of cultural identity.  Since 2005, she has made annual trips to photograph and record stories from the women of indigenous communities in Ethiopia'™s Omo River Valley and Kenya'€™s Lake Turkana watershed.   

Her recent body of work, Kara Women Speak / Stories from Women, is a multi-sensory, immersive body of work about women, culture, human rights and the environmental issues that threaten the communities of the Omo River Valley and Lake Turkana.​  It distills ten years of travel in the Omo River Valley in which she photographed and recorded stories from the women of indigenous communities living in Southwestern Ethiopia. This valley is home to roughly 12 indigenous tribal groups that are intimately connected to the natural world and have evolved over hundreds of years. These images and stories, along with field recordings of ambient sound, provide a sensory perception of life and time on the Omo River.

As Jane has described: “I made my first trip to the Omo in 2005, and at that time, what struck me about the cultures, people and land of the Omo River was the sense of going back in time. Time is tracked by the seasons and seasonal floods, by the moon, sun, and stars. It is not tracked with clocks and schedules, but a time much, much older.”

This project began when Baldwin, along with a group of four other women and their pilot, embarked on a low-level flying expedition following the great rivers and waterways that define life in Africa. They flew over 5900 miles in the six-seat Cessna 210 airplane named Ewaso, the Maasai word for “water”, traveling from the Nile’s source in Ethiopia to Cape Town, South Africa. During this trip, Baldwin learned about the Omo River Valley of Southwestern Ethiopia, one of the most remote and culturally diverse areas of the continent.

“The people of the Omo made me acutely aware of the integral role their river and forests have on their self-sustainability,” Jane has said. “They grow all of their own food, make their own clothes from the leathers of their goats, and forage wild fruits, seeds, and edible plants from the forest. They harvest honey from their beehives and gather medicinal plants. The Omo River provides fish and abundant water for their cattle, goats, and their communities. Our western consumer society is largely dependent on corporations to provide most of our basic needs. Planting an olive grove and producing olive oil and planting a small a garden and growing grapes for wine has given me a sense of independence. The lessons of self-sufficiency that I observed among the Omo River cultures created a heightened awareness about the importance of my own contribution to a more sustainable way of living.”

Since 2005, Baldwin has made annual trips to visit with women of the Omo River Valley. Her photographic process is intuitive and experiential. She works slowly and photographs along the way, often traveling by boat to isolated villages to spend time with the women.

“My projects have always started without clear goals, not by design; it's just the way my mind works,” Jane says. “On my first trip to the Omo, I didn't know what I wanted to photograph. I'd go into villages and walk around telling myself that I'd figure it out, and that it was ok to not know where to begin. By the end of the trip, I felt a visceral connection to the land and people, especially the women. Artists define their own way of working depending on their intention and objective. National Geographic and Magnum photographers receive an assignment to document a story within a given time period. My project started without an objective or intention, and through curiosity, became an act of discovery. The curiosity of discovery led to a connection with the Kara women.”

Her short film "Kara Women Speak" has been screened at national and international film festivals.  Her photographic work has been featured in selected publications, reviews, exhibitions and online sites, including the Global Oneness Project; LensCulture; Peace Palace Library at Bibliotheque du Palais de la Paix; Washington Center for Photography in Washington DC; Washington Post; and most recently, PBS Learning media and a 2015 solo exhibition at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.

Jane lives in Sonoma Valley, California.  ​She is a founding board member of PhotoAlliance in San Francisco, and is currently a member of the board of director of International Rivers in Berkeley.  She received a BA in English Literature from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, and studied photography at UC Berkeley-San Francisco's Extended Learning program. 

 

Dr. Laurie Mulvey creates classroom spaces that revolve around students rather than lesson plans, where individuals can discover their own questions and respond fully to the challenges of divergent views. Because she is fascinated by the quality of learning that occurs in these spaces, she has been refining a pedagogical approach that builds on this process for more than twenty-five years. Her passion for cross-cultural dialogue and collaborative critical thinking has emerged directly out of what she has observed in this kind of student- rather than lesson-driven classroom: Listening changes minds and sharing personal stories changes hearts. In combination, these kinds of experiences transform perspectives.

Dr. Mulvey is co-founder and Executive Director of World in Conversation, a student-driven center for true public diplomacy at Penn State University that is dedicated to facilitating radically open dialogues that expand perspectives and invite greater understanding between people. Founded on the vision that facilitated dialogue will revolutionize cross-cultural relationships by transforming conflict into collaboration, the center trains undergraduates to be facilitators who can deftly navigate exchanges on contentious topics ranging from U.S. race relations, climate change, faith, gender and culture. Each year, undergraduate facilitators lead more than 1200 face-to-face dialogues with over 8,000 of their peers on campus. Students join in these dialogues as part of a major course requirement for over 100 different courses in colleges across the university system. These are 90-minute one-time dialogues that invite personal stories, experiences, and divergent views about the topic. Undergraduate facilitators also use technology to leads hundreds of virtual dialogues between students around the world, including from universities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, China, Israel, Palestine, Pakistan, Egypt and Qatar.

Dr. Mulvey found her life’s calling when she and her husband, Dr. Sam Richards (a sociologist at Penn State University) learned to embrace the seemingly irreconcilable differences between them. Conversation was the centerpiece of their personal odyssey, and it became the foundation of the World in Conversation Project. The Project challenges people of all ancestries to examine the biases, the rumors, and the inherited scripts… and to listen to the stories of people who appear to be on the other side. This kind of engagement has the power to build real alliances.

Dr. Mulvey’s vision has infused every aspect of the Center. Under her leadership, World in Conversation has become the largest university-based cross-cultural dialogue program in the United States. In addition, her innovative Social Conflict course inspired the Center’s global (virtual) dialogues which have attracted the interest of partners such as UNDP and NATO, along with local and regional organizations in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, Afghanistan, Denmark, Bulgaria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Germany and Thailand (and the list is growing).

Dr. Mulvey has a Master's degree in Social Work and a Ph.D. in Human Development—which means she is devoted to how people navigate, grow and heal throughout the lifespan, and how all of this occurs in the context of relationships, family, small groups, cultures and societies.

Emily Baxter is the Creator and Director of We Are All Criminals, a non-profit, non-partisan organization that seeks to inspire empathy and ignite social change through personal stories of crime, privilege, justice, and injustice, disrupting the barriers that separate us. Through their stories, participants recall crimes they committed for which they were never caught and consider how different their lives might have been had they acquired a publicly accessible record of the incident. The purpose of the project is to question what it means to be a “criminal” and challenge the value of a record in assessing character and directing policy, when truly we are all criminals. Through this project, Baxter is seeking to raise awareness about the sometimes debilitating effects of the collateral consequences of criminal convictions, and how different life can turn out for people who have committed crimes but were never caught.

Baxter believes that criminality is not an “us versus them” situation. “One in four people in the United States has a criminal record,” she has explained. “In many jurisdictions those arrests are both public and permanent. It doesn’t matter if you do your time behind bars or in the community or even if you serve time at all. Really what matters is if you have a publicly accessible criminal record or publicly accessible juvenile record. In this data and electronic age, that can create an indelible print upon the ether than cannot be scrubbed away.”

This project looks at the other 75% without a permanent record: those who have had the luxury of living without an official reminder of a past mistake. Participants in We Are All Criminals tell stories of crimes they got away with. The participants are doctors and lawyers, social workers and students, retailers and retirees who consider how very different their lives could have been had they been caught. The stories are of youth, boredom, intoxication, and porta potties. They are humorous, humiliating, and humbling in turn. They are privately held memories without public stigma; they are criminal histories without criminal records.

We Are All Criminals seeks to challenge society’s perception of what it means to be a criminal and how much weight a record should be given. But it is also a commentary on the disparate impact of our nation’s policies, policing, and prosecution: many of the participants benefited from belonging to a class and race that is not overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Permanent and public criminal records perpetuate inequities, precluding millions of people from countless opportunities to move on and move up. We Are All Criminals questions the wisdom and fairness in those policies.

Baxter is a Fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School’s Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. Prior to this, she served as the director of advocacy and public policy at the Council on Crime and Justice in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and as an assistant public defender at the Regional Native Public Defense Corporation representing indigent members of the Leech Lake and White Earth Bands of Ojibwe charged with crimes in Minnesota State court. Emily began developing We Are All Criminals through an Archibald Bush Leadership Fellowship in 2012.

In his own words, Howard Glasser was a "doozy of a kid -- as difficult as they come."

Having known all too well the ins and outs of a challenging childhood, for the last 20 years, Howard has been fueling a Nurtured Heart Approach of working and communicating with children. He's authored a series of books, including the best-seller on ADHD, Transforming the Difficult Child, and has been called one of the most influential living persons working to reduce children’s reliance on psychiatric medications.

It all came about in a path less trodden. In the midst of doctoral research in Clinical Psychology and Educational Leadership, he veered down a 10-year road towards a different dream: woodworking. After months of sweeping floors, moving cabinets and sanding, he eventually become an accomplished cabinetmaker, and then a sculptor of unique curved wood pieces.

"Mastering this craft got me out of my head and into my heart. It afforded me the time, space and the luxury to find my spirit, kindness and love for humanity," he notes. When he returned to working as a therapist, he bore fresh eyes: for the first time since beginning his higher education, he was unencumbered by the theories and philosophies of others.

This led him to viscerally draw from his childhood intensity to offer the families he treated tools to shift the dynamics with their child. Urged by a local therapeutic program to present his powerful results, he finally accepted a speaking invitation to share his techniques. Soon after, he and a crew of therapist friends launched the Tucson Center for the Difficult Child, which became a homebase for their work in developing their approach.

Howard has been a featured guest on CNN, a consultant for 48 Hours, and has consulted for numerous psychiatric, judicial, and educational programs. He is the president of the Children Success Foundation and currently instructs educators, parents and therapists in this work through live presentations and Internet-based courses via the Nurtured Heart Online University.

Join us, on Saturday, March 19th, to dive deeper into his illuminating journey.

The first thing you'll notice are her shining eyes.

Anne Veh is an incredible force of love. An artist, curator, mother, wife, seeker, convener of school kindness circles, interviewer extraordinaire, eternal kindergartner (a la eternal kindergarten teacher, Betty Peck), delightful baker of scrumptious brownies and banana bread, and so many other elements-- one can spot her a mile away just by the glow of her enormous, radiant heart.

A seasoned artist and art curator with over 25 years of experience, Anne has served on the board of the Modern Art Council of SFMOMA, Youth in Arts, Headlands Center of the Arts, Photo Alliance, and Green Museum.

Beyond art museums and organizations, her life itself is a glowing piece of art.

With Anne, all the small things become sacred. Whether making holiday granola for her community, crocheting heart bracelets, and crafting artful pendants as kindness tags each piece of yarn or flake of oat is imbued with the spirit of her nurturing love. Nature and photography dance in her presence, whether she's editing a film on a local wildlife sanctuary, communing with a pair of hawks outside her balcony, welcoming a new puppy into the wide embrace of her care, or honoring the redwood trees that grace her neighborhood. An eternal optimist, she still stays real and raw during life's most challenging moments, whether it's by clearing her schedule to be with family during a loved one's last moments, lighting candles at her altar for those in difficulty, or simply showing up for close friends (whether in their teens or 90s!) during their hour of need. 

A refreshing compass for all things of the heart, she pours her radiance, sweetness and deep reverence for life into everything she does. By popular demand, the time has come for her to let us in on the secret of her joyful heart. :)

Join us, on March 12th, for a heartwarming conversation.

"Spend five minutes talking with Ron Nakasone and you will sense two things: a wisdom that makes you curious and a casualness that makes you comfortable," Peter Doebler writes.

An accomplished scholar in Buddhist Art and Culture at the Graduate Theological Union (an interreligious consortium of nine theological seminaries and eleven academic centers in Berkeley, California), Ronald Y. Nakasone, PhD, is heir to the age-old East Asian literati tradition that encourages self-cultivation, self-transformation, and self-realization through scholarship, community involvement, and art.  He is a master of Japanese calligraphy, or the art of sho.  In addition to having exhibited his work in Kyoto, Tokyo, Paris, Seoul, Xian, Chiang Mai, and cities throughout the United States, Ron is also an ordained Buddhist priest, an active member in Asian-American communities in the Bay Area, CA, as well as a subtle gardener.  Students have even composed an interpretive ballet dance to his artwork.

He has published more than 100 academic books and articles on Buddhist doctrine, ethics, and aesthetics, Aging and Spirituality, and Okinawan Studies. Students and colleagues contributed essays to Memory and Imagination, Essays and Explorations in Buddhist Thought and Culture (Nagata, 2010), a festschrift that commemorated his completion of one life cycle (60 years) according to the Chinese zodiac. He received the Sarlo Excellence in Teaching Award from the Graduate Theological Union in 2011.

Join us, on March 5th, for a pilgrimage of a conversation through Ron's journey.