The 50 Breakthroughs that the world is waiting for

Looking at the technological advances that fill our lives and occupy our attention, you might think that innovation is everywhere. That our creative, constructive efforts are being focused not only on our ability to text and instagram each other but also on making the world a better place.

If the world's appetite for smartphones can feed Apple an $18B profit in a single quarter, can't humanity's needs for clean water, housing and disease prevention create an equally compelling need for innovation?

The answer, sadly, is - not yet.

The Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, studied the 50 most critical scientific & technological breakthroughs required for sustainable global development (http://bit.ly/1xQijVz)

In the study, they attempted to identify "where game-changing technologies are most required," and to "Foster a thought-provoking conversation about the role of technology in solving the world's most pressing problems, and focus effort on the breakthroughs that really matter."

The world is waiting. It's waiting for desalinated water. For energy where there is cold and darkness. For better ways to treat and control malaria, one of the world's most prolific killers. And more.

We need more conversation on these problems. And we need to get to work.

A partial list is here. Click the above link to view the full report and list.

• A new method for desalination: scalable, low cost, and using renewable energy. 
• Vaccines that can effectively control and eventually help eradicate the major infectious diseases of our time—HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB 
• A new generation of homes with advanced construction material, especially for the urban poor: durable, lightweight, and affordable, with integrated solar-powered lighting, ventilation, and toilets 
• New methods to produce fertilizers to replace current processes, which are extremely capital intensive and have significant environmental footprints 
• A ‘utility-in-a-box’ for making it simpler, cheaper and faster to set up and operate renewable energy mini-grids 
• Short course TB treatment drugs that will lead to significant improvements in treatment adherence, and curb the spread of drug resistance 
• Micro-biocides to provide a method of protection against HIV/AIDS and Human Papillomavirus (HPV) for women who are otherwise vulnerable to infection through sexual contact with their partner 
• Improved, longer-lasting antiretroviral therapy (ART) formulations to control HIV viral replication and increase patient adherence 
• PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) to reduce the risk of HIV infection 
• An integrated, easy to operate, affordable, and solar-powered suite of medical devices specifically for maternal, child and primary care in low resource settings 
• A complete cure drug for Malaria that eliminates all malarial parasites, at every stage of the life cycle, from the human body 
• New long-lasting chemical mosquito repellents delivered in novel ways 
• New long-lasting non-chemical spatial mosquito repellents or attractants for vector control 
• Low cost off-grid refrigerators for preserving vaccines (and other temperature sensitive 
• Thermo-stabilizing mechanisms for preserving vaccines and other temperature sensitive, lifesaving pharmaceuticals so that they do not require refrigeration 
• Nutrient-dense and culturally appropriate foods for infants to complement breast milk during the weaning period 
• A low cost drilling system for shallow (rain-fed) groundwater wells, combined with portable sensors for measuring groundwater depth. Such systems should reduce the cost of drilling wells to under $100 per farmer in Africa 
• Affordable herbicides or other mechanisms to control weeds, ideally ones that are more environmentally friendly than herbicides currently on the market

A life of love

On my shelf there's a special book, its pages worn and creased. I bought it long ago, perhaps at in the children's section at Barnes and Noble. It's "Love you Forever" by Robert Munsch.

When my children were growing up, it was a must read before naps and at bedtime.

Even looking at its cover here brings back memories of all of the places we read it and of the shelves and closets where we hunted for it at story time.

The book follows a boy through his life - and his mother's love for him.  Whether he's flushing a watch down the toilet as a toddler or being a terrible teenager, his mother always gives him unconditional love.  Eventually, the boy expresses the same love for her - and tenderly holds her in her old age.

Valentine's Day is this week.  OK, I know this book is about a different kind of love, but love is love. A recent study found that about 15% of women send flowers to themselves at work on that day. No one should have to pretend that they are loved. Everyone should know love, whether it's romantic love - or the love that Robert Munsch writes about.

To me, love is demonstrated in small and personal moments. Many of these are described in simple ways in Munsch's book. These moments are almost always not fully appreciated until they've long passed.  Then we remember them in the sweetness of their context.

I have had many of those moments, which I cherish.

-  A teenager who holds my hand in the car
-  My twelve year old son, smiling at me as I laughed with his friends at his birthday party
-  When my parents bought me a present on my sister's birthday
-  My mother, who always took me for a milk shake after my doctor's appointment
-  My father, arriving unexpectedly at the hospital when my first child was born
-  My children, hugging each other when they come home from college
-  All those text messages that say, "Hey, dad" but I know mean, "I love you, dad"

This book, "Love you Forever" has sold 15,000,000 copies worldwide. And the reason so many people have this book on their shelves is because it tells a universal story of simple, unconditional love; unwavering and unchanging throughout a lifetime, illustrated in small ways, each day.

And it's love. What we should think about on Valentine's Day. Love for each other. Love for our mothers and fathers.

Love for someone who can look into your heart and make you tingle.

That Day You Remembered

We spent his 18th birthday together.

I remembered the day he was born, driving to the hospital, looking out the window at the stark February trees. Wondering about this youngest child. The kind of man he would become. And mostly about what we would become together.

On his birthday, I picked him up at noon. He walked out of the high school office, past the front gates and into the bleaching white Florida sunlight, squinting and smiling. I stood waiting next to the car and smiled back.

"Happy birthday, buddy. You're driving."

"Hi dad, oh .. thanks." With a knowing grin, he stepped over to the driver's side and happily tossed in his backpack. We were headed to St. Pete Beach for the afternoon.

"Have you driven on the highway before?"

"No, not really. A little."

We swung around the on-ramp and pulled into the flow of I-75 traffic, among landscaping trailers and massive motor homes. Pick-ups and motorcycles. The old, restless and tattooed. He was on edge. I was too. Everyone is - on that scary stretch of Florida asphalt.

I told him, alternately, to slow down, change lanes, speed up, move over, watch out. He was doing his best to take instruction and not glare at me.

"This is the worst stretch," I reassured him, "We'll be out of the heavy stuff soon." And we were. Soon, there were fewer trailers with towering stacks of Buicks and Cadillacs teetering over us. His fear was ebbing and his confidence building.

"Hey, Matt, did you know grandpa had a sports car convertible and he taught me how to drive in it?"

He smiled and glanced at me, hands on the wheel. "Seriously?"

I leaned back in my seat, remembering my father. "Yeah, he had this little green Fiat Spider convertible. When we first went out in it, he was wearing his beret and his leather gloves, because it was really too cold to have the top down, but we did anyway. You know what he said? Grandpa pointed at me with those leather gloves and said, 'This car is a sports car, John. Drive it like one. Don't be afraid.'"

Matt grinned said, "Yeah that sounds like grandpa, I miss him."

"Me too. Every day."

I think that was the first time I heard my father tell me to take chances. To have courage. Have fun. It was his way of telling me I was a man. That in his sports car, he wanted me to be an equal. I was just sixteen. Cool.

Those words made a difference in how I felt about myself. And how I would come to feel about him, really. I began to hear my father's advice differently after that, I think. It would always be worth paying attention.

That afternoon, Matt and I spent time in our favorite places. In Big Jim's Bait and Tackle shop, picking out reels and rods, tackle and lures. Sitting on the beach. Casting lines in the surf. Looking over the harbor at lunch, sharing a bottle of Anchor Steam.

We opened my safe and sorted through old watches, especially the one my father gave me from my train-hopping great great uncle - a wind-up sterling silver Waltham pocket watch from the late 1800's. We looked at guns and coins and collectibles.

Late in the afternoon, I saw Matt stretched across the couch, sleeping. Slanted rays of the setting sun, pink and orange, slipped past the blinds and had washed over him. He looked peaceful and content. His eyes opened and I said, "Go back to sleep, it's your birthday." He nodded.

Later, we packed up and headed home, drinking coffee from a thermos. One the way home, we stopped at our favorite roadside farm stand, where they make perfect Cuban sandwiches and sell home-made key lime pies. We bought a Coke and a pie. Switched places and he drove home. This time, he was more confident.

At one point, I asked him, "Which of your birthdays do you remember the most? For me, when I was in third grade my mother had a party with my friends in the backyard. I remember getting this plastic submarine and a cool GI Joe foot locker."

He thought for a minute and shook his head. "I don't think any really come to mind. But I'll remember this one."

Me too.

On the way home, as he drank his Coke and we listened to Kenny Chesney singing "Key Lime Pie", he glanced at me and asked, "Dad, I'm, going 83, is that OK?"

"Of course. This is a sports car, Matt. Drive it like one."

Things About You, About Love

This week, I've been thinking about love and about time.

About spontaneity. How some of the best moments just - happen.

Timothy Leary, famous for trying to discover a higher level of consciousness, once wrote, "Conscious love is not an emotion; it is serene merging with yourself, with other people, with other forms of energy."

I think Leary, despite his fascination with psychedelics, got it just right.

Which is why these moments are so rare. Because a "serene merging" with someone requires a special state. A higher level of consciousness that most of us - perhaps all of us - have a really hard time achieving. But - in those rare moments - we feel its power.

Powerful, profound. A high, an epiphany, a euphoria. A narcotic transfiguration of who we thought we were - and whom we thought you were. For a moment - for an instant - we change. Time freezes.

Maybe these frozen moments in time are simply achieved elements of our destiny.

Leary also wrote, “If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love."  You see, he knew that conscious love was impossible to create in the vortex of mixed emotions. Dr. Leary's prescription for serenity was the removal of emotion.

For how can this merging of self and others be achieved in an environment of thinking, analyzing, reacting, comparing, hoping and resenting?

It just can't be. It's spontaneous and karmic.

What I'm saying is that this is different from the continuum of a relationship that is wrapped in commitments and history and connections. It's a moment in time.

It's why we desperately seek moments like these. Whether we do it knowingly or not. And I think that these flashes in time are what souls long to experience. It's a drug that offers a brief glimpse of heaven.

I've had a few of those experiences. They are sweet and transcendent. And hopeful. Certainly addictive. And, like everyone, I think of them with longing.

Like that night. In that old house, when we talked almost all night about life and love and the world. You were sitting on your knees on the couch. As we were talking, you spontaneously sat on my lap, laughing and looking into my eyes. You barely knew me. But my love felt, in that moment, deep and conscious.

I wonder, from time to time, if either of us will find it again. But I hope that we both always remember that feeling. It was about you, about love - and about time.

You know what I mean.

To the Crazy Ones - always on the road again

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine.
They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world,
are the ones who do…”

― Jack Kerouac

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/08/kerouac200708

We are History

It was said that, as a literary spokesman for the post World War II generation, he didn't have the talent of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.  That he was, by comparison, a kind of literary James Dean.

His work, "On the Road" was a journal of adventure, observation and an earnest search for revelations. Revelations which, while pondered, sadly never came.

He was Jack Kerouac. Poet, bard, beatnik and philosopher.

I imagine Kerouac in a smoke-filled diner - hungover, smoking and scribbling words into a notebook ... perhaps on a red vinyl bench in a kind of otherworldly diner - a place few of us can visit. Penciling his intoxicated and sometimes despondent narrative. 

In a collection of journals completed during the late 1940's, Kerouac wrote his historic, spiral stream of consciousness, which became the book "On the Road" in 1951. It was later described as one of the best and most important treatises of the twentieth century. 

In fact, The New York Times called it, "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."

I can see him in that cafe, looking down at his own shaky cursive, squinting his eyes through the haze:

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” 

Many months ago, I was in a country on the other side of the world. On that trip, I received a kind of Dear John text saying, “I owe you nothing.  All we share is a history.”  The unspoken inference was that it was a paid debt.

They were words that felt as cold as the February wind that used to blow across Lake Michigan and down the icy steps of my college dorm. Words like erasers. A disclaimer, a hurt.

In that strange hotel, I felt Kerouac's same uncertainty - that I was disconnected and I didn't know who I was - lost in a land of nowhere. Sent by those words.

Looking out my hotel window, it was like watching a movie - a staged drama of street vendors, flashing lights, taxis and motorcycles. Not real; disconnected. I felt like a ghost.

But now I feel better. I know better. No one owns history.

I've been thinking about my Dear John text and about history. And slowly, my thoughts are coalescing; that our history is created and shared together. It's best described, for lack of elegant poetry, simply as who we are and who we were. A past and a present that exist - that can only exist - together.

Who we were on Easter mornings, remembering the brilliant greens of newness together - is who we are. We are who we were looking at the storm that night, holding hands. Our now is an eternity of coming home after work and holding a child together in parental bliss. Visits to the obstetrician and pediatrician. Weddings, funerals.

It's not a thing, it's a soul's journey - meandering across space and time and collecting character. It becomes an impressionist sense of self, its colors and textures and brush strokes materializing into something beautiful and intangible - like art ... or music. But it can only be seen and heard - especially - looking back.

It's not a forgotten 80's song with cheesy lyrics and guitar solos. It's Bach and Beethoven and Mozart - historic and ageless symphonies that are a concord of sounds - scores built upon individual musical parts.

Movements. Moments. Merging into a timeless atlas of life when played just right.

Perhaps our history is a kind of karmic puzzle, its pieces pre-cut and scattered across time and space, waiting to be placed into a proper design, its image slowly emerging piece by piece. But those pieces are there – and they fit together. And no one owns them.

But, one night, I saw the puzzle, in all of its wonderful pieces, spread across my floor. I felt calmness and connection. I knew.

My children and their boyfriends and girlfriends were visiting. One of the kids asked, "Dad, what's in this box - are these pictures?" They started pulling old Kodak envelopes out of the box, and soon we had a room full of memories.

They were showing the old printed photographs to their friends, laughing and smiling and hugging. Taking pictures of the pictures. Sharing them on Facebook and Instagram; younger days, old school friends, forgotten family vacations. Catching fish in the backyard. Little league games in forgotten uniforms. Grandparents and cousins.

Scores and scores of instrumental love. The music of our history filled the room. The past and the present sat on the carpeting together, merged into a perfect harmony. The future ... perhaps it could be glimpsed too.

And it really helped heal my soul.

In the Weekly Standard, Ted Gioia described Kerouac's book.  He said, "...if you read the book closely, you see that sense of loss and sorrow swelling on every page. In truth, 'On the Road' is a book of broken dreams and failed plans."

Well, maybe so. But, I think Kerouac was like all of us - but with a keener eye and a better pencil. Because we all have broken dreams and failures on this journey of our soul.

And that's OK, because our journey, our history, is who we were and who we are.

It's beautiful music, this journey of the soul.

We all keep traveling, just like Kerouac - filling our journals. And making history on this long road.

It's all we have - she was right. And so wrong.

Daniel Burnham, Columbus, and dad

This winter, the boys and I spent a few days together in Chicago.  We decided on a meaningful exploration of the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry. Just off Lake Shore Drive, they are part of the architectural collection that remains from Chicago's World's Fair and Columbian Exposition.

Columbian, as in Columbus. It was part of the World's Fair held in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492.

In the living room of our old house, my father had hung a carved bust of Christopher Columbus - which resembled a sort of ship's prow - on the wall.  He'd point up at it and say, "That Columbus statue was the centerpiece in the main entrance to the Columbian Exposition. It's priceless."

We'd look up at the balding man carved into the dark wood and suspend our disbelief in deference to his knowledge of Chicago history. And then add it to our list of dad's other priceless treasures. The centerpiece of the Fair was actually the large water pool, which represented the voyage Columbus took to the New World. But to dad, it was his statue.

The Chicago Columbian Exposition was, in large part, designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted. Burnham, born in Chicago, would eventually become a master designer of cities, including Washington, DC and, of course, his own Chicago.

After Burnham was rejected by both Harvard and Yale, he decided to apprentice as a draftsman. From there, at 26, he met John Wellborn Root and his future. Namely, Burnham and Root.

The Exposition was a prototype, a collection of iconic buildings that were to constitute what
Burnham and his colleagues thought a city should be. It followed Beaux Arts principles of design, which was the French neoclassical architectural principles of symmetry, balance, and splendor.

This collection, in prototype, became an architectural heaven of sorts for future generations. Today, the buildings house Chicago's most prized collection of natural science artifacts, artistic treasures, history, knowledge, and beauty. Things like impressionist masterpieces and a captured, life-size, World war II submarine. The buildings are now known as the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum of Natural History and the Art Institute of Chicago.

I always thought that the Field Museum was an apt reference to a kind of natural history that had to do with indians, prairies and fields. Actually, it was named after Marshall Field in 1905, after Edward Ayer convinced him to be its principal benefactor. Little did he know then that it would cement a legacy Macy's would never have.

Back to my exploration with the boys. At the Field Museum, we were especially awed by the dioramas - particularly the models of native American history. These tiny depictions of early American life under glass were intricately crafted, like model train landscapes - only way cooler.

The real native Americans around Chicago - the Illinois and Miami indians - camped and trailed along the lower stretches of Lake Michigan, and they flourished on the bounties of the prairies, woodlands and, of course, the lake.

The Sauk Trail was used by many regional tribes.  It followed the southern boundary of the lake, winding between dense forests and mixed grasslands.  A mastodon trailway was found along the same path, which indicates that the indians may have been just using an old game trail. The same paths today host a mixture of modern peoples, from the destitute and dangerous (no match for even a Mastodon) to the wealthy and privileged.

Despite the mind-freezing beauty of the steel and concrete towers that bully the icy blue waters along the western shore of Lake Michigan, there is an underlying sense of tension among those who bundle along its modern trails of midways and streets.

Perhaps it is the numbing cold.  But I think it's more than that. There is implicit agreement (or at least a resigned acknowledgement) among its residents today that the city can only "work" - can only remain stable - via a complex political system of life support. It must provide for the city-employed, the under-employed, and the socially and financially destitute. All in the form of entitlements. Proffered via pensions, union contracts, bursting city payrolls, welfare, healthcare and housing.

To fuel this massive political machine, it takes sacrifice, money, and compromise. This is probably not the kind of social and political structure that World's Fair planners had in mind for future generations when they hosted the celebration in the White City.

No, Burnham and his colleagues had definitely not envisioned this. Today's city has the highest sales tax rate in the country. 550,000 residents fled the metropolitan area in the last decade. The worst bond rating in the country. 18.7% private sector unemployment in the downtown district. Violent crime rates so high that, in 2014, the mayor asked the military to help patrol the streets of Chicago - just one step away from declaring marshal law in the third largest US city. And a disparaging social media moniker of "Chiraq" - comparing the city to the war-torn country of Iraq.  

Residents and visitors are charged a gluttony of entertainment and restaurant fees, taxes, and surcharges. They endure red light photo-tickets, traffic jams, and crowds. With the parking meter system privatized to a foreign country, the city has no control over excessive parking fees. Employers are taxed and then taxed again with surcharges.

When we visited, we joked about the ridiculous prices. We'd say, 'imagine a really high cost for some simple thing, like a cup of coffee or a hot dog. Then double it.' In other words, if you can't afford a $7.99 hot dog ($8.80 with tax), a $5.29  coffee ($5.80 with tax), and a $175 red light ticket ($325 if paid late) on your lunch break - don't go out to eat. And don't go without a bodyguard.

And so, things have changed,  But we can still go to our 1893 slice of heaven, where Burnham and his contemporaries imagined a more perfect city - then built it for us, right on a beautiful lakefront. Then the city's patriarchs filled the buildings with impressionist works of art, submarines, and - my favorite - dioramas.

So maybe my dad wasn't really all that far off when he pointed up at the bust of Christopher Columbus and told us it was priceless.

Summer 1971, a day just like today

Last night, I was driving alone along a deserted stretch of a coastal highway, listening to a song from the seventies. Out across the Gulf, past the endless rows of mangroves, the full moon sparkled on the waves. It was soothing and mesmerizing - the music and the moon and the sea.

It was "Sunshine on my Shoulders," from 1971. Listening, I was pulled into a kind of swirl, a swirl of memory, a living black-light poster, like the kind we used to pin to our bedroom walls.

In that spin, I was moved to a tree-lined Chicago street, which smelled of dandelions and pine and fresh-cut grass.

It was the summer of 1971. My father had just moved our family into an old Victorian home, three stories tall and filled with leaves and ghosts, across the street from a city park. Our old brick house, silly and small, could have fit inside our new coach-house garage.

My memories of 1971 are jumbled. They're an odd collection of stuff, like piles of old Polaroids and candy wrappers and album covers spread out on my bedroom floor. Things that fell out of my pockets, like Bazooka bubble gum cartoons and real silver dimes and my pool pass. The key to my bike lock.

Some of these memories, these jumbled feelings, make me especially miss my father. 

I remember my father then - it was a time of excitement and hope when we moved into that big old house. I can see my father in glimpses of images during those days. I can see his short hair and his buttoned blue oxford shirt. Coming through the green screen door on our old back porch after he came home from his gallery. 

I can't explain why, but there's a heartache there. A sadness. It's a sense of loss - for the passing of young hope and endless possibilities into future days of reality. But it's so comforting that I know how the story ends. And it's a happy ending. 

Hopeful. Happy. Sad. It was the 70's.

During that summer in 1971, there were several of us who would hang out in the park across the street. There was famous old pine tree in one corner of the place.  It had huge, gnarled old branches that stretched out across the concrete city water fountain just below it.  Three giant shoulder-high branches around the trunk. We'd take turns on them, smelling the sticky pine sap and listening to the gurgle of the water from the fountain below. Patches of the summer sun on our faces.

For us - at those moments - time stood still. We didn't think of existence outside that moment. Outside our world. Or beyond that afternoon. We knew what we knew. The park, the trees. The ice-cold water fountain. The summer sky and the pine sap and the dandelions.

We didn't know then, sitting on those branches, that the 173rd Airborne Brigade was being deployed to Southeast Asia, where they would fight under that same summer sun, collecting nearly 6,000 Purple Hearts in those summer days while we drank from our fountain of youth under the pine tree.

I was so young I didn't pay much attention to the radio. I didn't have a record player. But good heavens, 1971 was a magical year of music. It brought the world Janis Joplin, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Joan Baez, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, the Who, Cat Stevens, Issac Hayes, Gladys Knight, and Aretha Franklin.

Among them, was a hippie country singer named John Denver. His was a sweet, soothing, and melodic voice. 

In 1971, John Denver sang about a day. One day, with sunshine and perfection. A perfect day that he poetically sought ways to share with us.

I never thought much about the song until that night, driving along I-75. 

But as I listened, I remembered the timelessness of that summer in 1971, with the speckled summer sun shining on us as we clung to our pine tree. 

And, across the street in that old Victorian house, hope. The hope I see now, in the fullness of time, in the images of my young father. His hope for the future. In those memories, I feel happiness and a certain sadness.

And now, I better understand Denver's words. It is a moment of bliss and perfection - impossible to fulfill except in memory. The happiness that exists in the innocent hope of days past. Discovered in a time warp.  Ageless and timeless. The time of a life, of youth, of childhood, of old age.  But that perfect moment is there. That perfect day of sunshine is there.

And that day is a day like just like - a timeless today.

In 1971.
  
If I had a day that I could give you
I'd give you a day just like today
If I had a song that I could sing for you
I'd sing a song to make you feel this way

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine, almost always, makes me high

If I had a tale that I could tell you
Id tell a tale sure to make you smile
If I had a wish that I could wish for you
I'd make a wish for sunshine all the while

Christmas tides

On this morning before Christmas, I'm on my balcony looking out across the Gulf of Mexico. Staring at the blue horizon, squinting and thinking.  Thinking how the cadence of our lives seems to move like the ebb and flow of this majestic turquoise tide.

And about poppies.

Watching whirlwinds of sand on the beach, they look like mini-tornadoes trying to escape the grasp of the bleached white shore, which is clogged with New York tourists and annoying seagulls.

The towers of determined sand spin and twist, longing to escape back into the silence and infinity of the blue green waters. Among the unseen and the magical.

Shallow and glittering and peaceful, the Tiffany waters move enticingly closer - then dance away as the moon and heavens chase each other across the skies.

Away from the beach, the city is alive with people preparing for the holidays. Like marching ants and swarming bees, it is a pheromonic-like procession.  A directed, animated process of observations - learned in dining rooms, Sunday schools and churches. Reinforced in social engineering and in religious education and doctrine. Confirmed as conveyances of happiness and, sadly, meaning.

No one would argue that traditions don't provide a sense of greater belonging and purpose - regardless of one's social, economic, racial, or intellectual status. They help transcend our production-line of existence and cement our collective and individual religious values. They're important to goodness and community.

But aren't they really just an anesthetic? A numbing to the realization that perhaps we're just another grain of sand on the beach?

For if our souls do truly have a purpose - and I believe they do - a meaningful existence transcends these merely mechanical observances. Of course, religious constructs are important elements of how we interact with our God.

But we can't ignore our soul's real purpose. How can we escape the billions of other grains of sand that make up this beach if we don't create a whirlwind? How can we fling ourselves into the turquoise waters?

I believe the Dali Lama has a soul that is connected to other higher souls over the infinity of time and the universe. People all over the world, whether they are Buddhist or not - also believe. Someday, perhaps quantum theory will begin to explain it - if it's comprehensible at all while in this existence.

The purpose of the soul is not love. It is not about being an expert at following tradition or being a good keeper of religious conformity. Grains of sand know, maddeningly, how to fit nicely next to each other.

It is about seeking justice. The meaningful work of the soul is to make a difference in achieving justice.  Seeking justice for equality and freedom and human rights. Justice that each soul that arrives in this time and space has an opportunity to make a difference. That our souls aren't sold into a slaver's chains in Charleston or slaughtered in a French field. That entire generations aren't eliminated in Polish and German camps. That babies can't be poisoned by toxic chemicals.

Souls like Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela and Maya Angelou.

And Martin Luther King, who once wrote, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." 

And from army surgeon John McRae. During the warm days of May in 1915, in France, he was near the Ypres-Yser canal. As he watched a fellow soldier die, he composed a poem, heartfelt and poignant, about wasted lives and its profound sadness. Its simple lines are as compelling as the most righteous defenders of justice our world has known:





















Today, in the moat at the Tower of London, individual poppies commemorate the nearly 900,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen who died in that war, one of history’s bloodiest conflicts. It is visited by many millions of people each year.  John McRae's simple but powerful words echo across space and time. A poetic treatise that suffering so many souls is a greater loss than any land, any conflict.

Poppies of justice. Like grains of sand on the beach, swirling and coalescing into something forceful.

It is this noble effort of the soul that Robert F. Kennedy described when he wrote:

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” 

And so this morning, looking out across the water, I'm thinking about poppies and poems and justice. And why Christmas is really, in many ways, about the birth of Justice.

A Felt Longing

Today, as Katie and Maria gather to bake Christmas cookies, I know they'll be thinking about Cathy. I know I am.  It is a sad longing but also a reminder that her essence still fills our lives.

This was a story I wrote last year - and I can't say it better. It's still true.

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I think this rickety old house knows it will soon be sold, along with its quirks and antiques, its funny smells and its memories.

Today, Kellie visited the house for a final tour. As she walked past the dining room mirror, I could almost see Cathy on her arm, in bell-bottoms and a sweater. Just the way this place remembers her. And the way I do.

To Cathy, who left us last winter, Kellie was one of the inseparable few.  Like Sally and Bobbie, they seemed to be souls connected in early childhood - and maybe long before that.

And now, too often, the vacuum of Cathy's absence seems like an empty ocean that needs filling.

On a bitter and cold January night, I told Sally that we'd miss how Cathy helped each of us feel important. That who we are, what we've done and whatever we'd experienced in that moment in time was special.  She made our lives feel special because she believed in our goodness.

Sally stared at me.  "Now what?" And with that, she disappeared through the front door and into the night - without a coat. Just covered with sadness.

Now what indeed?

"I remember our first day in this house, before you moved in," Kellie said as we walked through the dining room.  "Cathy and I counted all the knobs in the kitchen because we'd never seen so many before.  There were 57."  Just like Cathy to see wonder in every little thing, like the number of kitchen knobs.

I offered Kellie a laminated copy of Cathy's secret cookie recipe, which Meg found in the back of a cookbook in the kitchen.  She smiled, "She never wanted me to have this whole recipe; she'd just give me parts of it and leave me wondering why my cookies were never as good as hers," she said, laughing, "I won't take it now, but I will take a picture of it." Just like Kellie to keep the joke rolling between heaven and earth.

As we passed through rooms and closets and different parts of the house, she'd recall what the two of them did there.  "Your mother asked us to make chocolate chip cookies so often in this kitchen that we used to time how fast we could finish a batch. I think our fastest time was eight and a half minutes."

She told us how they felt when they first saw the house, with dried fall leaves and dust covering the parquet floors. I'm sure we both thought of the transformation that would happen as we filled those same rooms with Simon and Garfunkel music, high school parties, and holidays.

Like Christmas.  When Cathy would decorate it with pieces of herself.

Every Christmas, from bolts of felt, Cathy would create Christmas stockings for each of us. With scissors and glue, she'd decorate each of them with illustrations.  They were her portraits of us - painting, cooking, our dolls, our music, our sports - us.  Reminders of how she felt we were special. And we were.  Together, we were.

Of course her green parrot, Charlie, was always on her stocking. Charlie, now an adopted member of Sally's family - spoiled and glorious and indestructible.

Last night, I received a text from my son Andrew. He was telling me how much he loved that Katie, his sister, was again making felt stockings for our family. About asking him for ideas for her boyfriend's family. He said, "For a moment I was sad because it reminded me of how much I missed Cathy. But then I thought how cool it was that Cathy lived on through Katie."

Cathy lives on in so many different ways. In felt stockings, in turquoise Christmas ornament parties that her inseparable soul-mates host in her honor, in stories and smiles, and in much much more.

Even in Sally's new adopted parrot.

But mostly she lives on in us - as we find ways to remember that we are special and that our lives are wonderful - which we thought would be unimaginable without her.

Now, her lingering sweetness - and goodness - is part of us, all around us.

Now what?  I think we found the answer.

Jamestown, Plymouth and the Camping Trip from Hell

I think I can picture it. The bubonic plague had just swept through England some twenty years earlier, and people had had enough of 17th century London. The exodus started with John Smith via the London Company and the Jamestown settlement.

It probably wasn't too hard for the Puritan leaders to pitch the Mayflower cruise to parishioners. They were probably only too happy to exchange the streets of London for religious opportunities and the imaginary landscapes of the New World.

John Rolfe had found his own heaven in the New World in 1614 with Pocahontas. Right?

And, after overcoming early horrors, John Smith and the Jamestown colony had started growing tobacco, reinforcing their forts and working to rebuild their relations with the local native Americans.

But then, even as preparations were being made on the Mayflower, the settlers in Jamestown passed smallpox to the native Americans in the Massachusetts Bay area, killing 90% of them between 1618 and 1619.

Then, in September of 1620, 102 delusional - or brave - passengers aboard the sailing ship Mayflower arrived in the New World, at the eastern tip of what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They arrived into a beautiful and vicious land; unforgiving and violent. An imminent winter was waiting. It was a land of disease and danger and starvation.

By the following spring, over half of them had died from malnutrition and disease.

Those that survived, like Smith's group, planted corn and other crops.  Ironically, it was Squanto from the Pawtuxet tribe - a people entirely lost to smallpox - that the settlers relied on to learn basic survival, hunting, and planting skills. He spoke English because he had been kidnapped by the British and taken to England years before.

The abundance of their harvest in the fall of 1621 was cause for a celebration.  A gathering that we commemorate across America today as Thanksgiving. No doubt they had reason to be thankful - for having survived a terrifying ordeal across the Atlantic only to witness many of their friends and family succumb to death aboard the Mayflower, moored upon the icy New England shore.

Chief Massasoit (of Wampanoag tribe), who gave them 12,000 acres to colonize, was invited to the November feast. Massasoit showed up with 90 men - so many that they had to hunt for deer and fowl to supplement the foodstuffs of their hosts.

The following year, in 1622, in the English Colony of Virginia, natives of the Powhatan tribe
attacked the settlers along the James River and killed 347 people - men, women and children. The number amounted to about a quarter of all settlers living in the New World at that time.  It is alleged that this was precipitated by John Smith's violent raiding parties into the Indian settlements to demand food.

This brutal massacre emboldened the colonists and their homeland backers. Historian Betty Wood writes:

"(this) ... gave the colonists the excuse they needed to take even more of what they wanted from the indigenous population of the Chesapeake. As far as the survivors of the Massacre of 1622 were concerned, by virtue of launching this unprovoked assault native Americans had forfeited any legal and moral rights they might previously have claimed to the ownership of the lands they occupied."

Following counterattacks by the English colonists that same year (1622), a peace parley was arranged. The Jamestown colonists poisoned the Powhatan liquor for the parley's ceremonial toast. The poison killed another 200 Powhatan natives.

Taped to our refrigerators this time of the year, there are craft paper drawings of belt-buckle pilgrim hats and horns of plenty. Crayon sketches of indians and pilgrims sitting peacefully together sharing the abundance of the season.

Perhaps they were for a day. And maybe that's reason enough to be thankful.

That Thanksgiving afternoon was probably a brief respite from their camping trip from hell.