Books

Image: soundplusdesign.com

When I woke at 4:57am today in rural Vermont, I realized I had been woken by birdsong. The air was so packed with it you couldn't distinguish one call from the next. There was no starting and stopping; it was full on, full-throated and loud, startlingly so. My two-year-old woke up asking for milk and a spot in my bed. Neither of us fell back asleep.

Lying there in the half-light, I remembered waking up in New York City when I lived there a decade ago and what that sounded like: traffic, traffic, store front shields scraping up for the day, sirens, more traffic—a tinny, grinding, cacophonous din, which sometimes, for reasons I never figured out, became a hum that could sound like surf if you forgot where you were (which was never easy). Heavy snowfall was the only thing capable of muffling the City into, not silence, but a constrained quietude. And for a few hours—if we were lucky…the spell could be broken in minutes—all of Manhattan became a blanketed leviathan, a feverish heart in the chest of a submerging whale, an entombed anthill writ large. That’s when we’d get out our skis and slice right down the center of 2nd Avenue or up Broadway to the sparkling stretches of Central Park bordered on all sides by the city, uprising enormously in all its geometric force and certainty. But it was soft in the middle, and we sluiced along.

Image: Joyce Geleynse

I am encouraged right now. I’m wrapping up my reading of Stick Your Neck Out: A Street-Smart Guide to Creating Change in Your Community and Beyond by John Graham, President of The Giraffe Heroes Project. This book has lots of inspiring stories about individuals taking risks to make a difference in their communities, and it provides some concrete tips on beginning and sustaining these efforts. It’s an easy read that helps to fuel the possibilities.

I’m also a regular reader of Rich Harwood’s blog and appreciate his regular acknowledgements of individuals making a difference. He often takes popular culture or nationally reported incidences and finds the golden nugget or the silver lining, gently but cogently urging us to work from the better place within. And I watch with admiration as Steve Clift of eDemocracy and Matt Leighninger of Deliberative Democracy work away to foment change at a collective level.

This morning I sat down with my two-year-old son to read a book called Harry and the Lady Next Door. Though I’ve been familiar with the story since my own childhood, a hidden story within the story revealed itself to me today. But let’s start with the basic premise:

Harry (our protagonist) is a small, friendly, spotted dog of the terrier variety, who loves “all his neighbors…all except one.” The neighbor in question is the infamous Lady Next Door (antagonist), who sings incessantly, very high and very loud, which of course hurts Harry’s sensitive ears. She sings higher than the peanut man’s whistle, louder than the siren on the fire engine, higher and louder than all of the neighborhood cats put together. So Harry sets out to make her stop.

Photo: © Pedro Meyer, 1997

Just the other night I was casting around for some blog post inspiration. We all work so hard in the trenches and in our heads that sometimes it’s hard to get out of the present and think a little more broadly.

So there I am reading my local weekly paper and out jumps an essay about Plato. That is one of the attributes of living in a college town: professors will share their musings, often “dumbed down” for us mere mortals. In this particular article, Professor Victor Nuovo discusses “Laws,” a less well known work of Plato’s, and reminds us of the role of individuals:

“[I]f the rule of law is to accomplish [peace], it cannot be imposed upon a people from the outside or from above. It must operate within each individual member of society....” (Addison County Independent, March 11, 2010 p 17A).

This might be a funny subject to take up in a blog, but in my recent reading of Margaret J. Wheatley’s excellent book, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time, I was struck by the following comment:

“At first glance, the World Wide Web seems to be a source of new communities. But these groups do not embrace the paradox of community. The great potential of a world connected electronically is being used to create stronger boundaries that keep us isolated from one another. Through the Web, we can seek relationships with others who are exactly like us. We are responding to our instinct of community, but we form highly specialized groups in the image of ourselves, groups that reinforce our separateness from the rest of society.”

The bulk of Orton’s Heart & Soul approach focuses on collaboration that develops the H&S “environment,” implements results through H&S project work and successfully defends against shortsighted threats to H&S values. This approach requires new behavior and thinking by emphasizing broad public participation, identifying shared values and reconciling values with priorities.

Stick with me now...

Social Velocity’s blog has a new post today on boldness and big goals for non-profits. They argue that most non-profits are risk-averse and have trouble setting impressive, scary, crazy goals, and yet that’s exactly what they need to do in order to make serious headway. (Note: they don’t say how many could fail along the way.)

This makes me think about the risks inherent in the work we do at the Foundation. When you set big goals, you up the ante; it's inevitable that the risks involved are just as big—if not bigger. Towns, likewise, need to be willing to be bold. I’ve advocated strongly for our Project Towns to set some clear goals for attendance and participation at community events, and I think they’re often reluctant to do so for the same risk-averse reasons that Social Velocity discusses. It’s hard to shoot for 300 people at a meeting when the most you’ve ever had is 50; but attendance will never get close to 300 unless towns aim for more than what’s expected.

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities published in 1972 got me thinking about how we imagine the places in which we live, how the imagined places differ from the actual places, and the ways in which the physical structure of a place reflects the minds and desires of the people living there—and vice versa. Cities, in Calvino’s dreamlike tale, are like living, breathing organisms. They are built as much of the emotions and thoughts inspired when walking through them as they are of bricks and mortar. Here’s a passage from a chapter entitled “Continuous Cities”: