Nat

Today’s Boston Globe carries an AP article about a program for inmates in Missouri prisons to cultivate vegetable gardens. The produce from these gardens is donated to food pantries for the elderly poor in the state. The activity is one of the elements of a program called “restorative justice.” Under this label, which was developed in the 1970s, prisons offer inmates the chance to study the impact of their crimes on crime victims and to find ways to make amends.

In Missouri, several participants grew up on farms, and they are now teaching skills to inner city prisoners while reviving their own interest in producing food. One of the prisoners, James Burton Jr., says of the restorative justice garden, “This is almost like being free here. I like knowing I’m giving to the elderly.” The article goes on to quote a cook at one of the food banks, who says that the produce donation has cut her food costs by a third.

I love projects like these, which encourage people to make amends by doing something good. This program is so practical in meeting two needs at once. It was very inspiring.

Today was my stepdaughter’s last day of junior high school, and we attended the student awards program. I loved the way the staff spread the prizes among a relatively large group of students. They gave awards in every subject, for the arts, and for good citizenship. I’m very proud that my stepdaughter won three prizes.

I’m proudest of the award she won for citizenship. It acknowledges a student each year who serves the school well at school and who represents it well in the community. The principal, a lovely woman who is retiring from a 35-year career in education today, talked about Catherine’s cheerfulness and her smile. She mentioned that Catherine brightens the school with her attitude and friendliness.

Nothing matters more to me than this trait, and I’m thrilled to pieces that she receives praise for demonstrating it. Mrs. Conlon, the retiring principal, started today’s assembly reading a quote from Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. In it the prince meets and befriends a fox. When they part, the fox tells the prince, “Remember that there are two ways to see, with your eyes and with your heart. The only way to see well is with your heart.”

It’s a lovely reminder, and Catherine needs no one to remind her. She sees with her heart every minute of every day. She is special. We are blessed.

What I’m finding as we deal with a loss in the family is that our personal strengths have been amplified. I am fundamentally optimistic and forward looking, and that has never been more true than now. It is the only way I know how to find the determination to press on. There is really nothing else to do.

I think that is the mental trick, or demand. I can’t afford to live with the saddest part of loss for too long at one time. For starters, I want to be part of a legacy we can all be proud of.

When I was 20, one of my friends, a talented, vivacious woman named Maryann, died in an accident. After the funeral, her father, a profoundly wise and compassionate man, gathered her friends together and said, “I want to ask you to do one thing for me. Whenever you have the chance–for the rest of your lives–to do something great, or not to, choose to do something great. Remember that Maryann won’t have the chance. If all of you do this, I will have the comfort of knowing that dozens of people are doing more than they otherwise would.”

I haven’t always lived up to that advice, but I’ve never forgotten it. That’s how I think of loss now: the best way to honor someone we love is to do the most we can to honor their life.

The new Time Magazine has Al Gore on the cover under the headline “The Last Temptation of Al Gore.” Obviously the teaser headline focuses on whether or not Al Gore is the perfect Democratic candidate for president in 2008 if the current front runners stumble. Gore himself, though, shows much keener interest in the major challenges facing our society: first, global warming, and second, the crisis of irrationality in American politics, about which he has written his new book, “The Assault on Reason.” In that book, which Time excerpts, Gore writes that the rise of television in the last 50 years has fundamentally eroded our country’s ability to debate the most pressing issues we face.

His conclusion is startling and hopeful: we can take steps to resolve this issue, and the Internet may be a key to how we do it. He also quotes Gandhi’s concept of a “truth force.” The truth force posits that humans have an innate ability to recognize the most powerful truths.

The article is remarkable on many, many levels, starting with the way Gore has emerged from the personal pain of losing an election in which he won the popular vote, to become a spokesperson for attention to climate change, an Oscar-award winning filmmaker, a board member of Apple and a senior advisor to Google, as well as a best-selling author.

I have to confess that Gore didn’t inspire me at all when he ran for president in 2000, but that’s not really the point. What thrills me is his example of reacting to an enormous setback to re-invent himself as an even more interesting person than he would have been had he won.

In the Time article, Tipper Gore describes her husband as having complete freedom to do what he wants, in the way that he wants to do it. She makes it sound pretty grand.

Meanwhile, Gore believes resolutely in Gandhi’s notion of our collective ability to recognize the truth we need to learn. The entire article made an inspiring case for the future: a person can respond to disappointment and failure with growth and energy, and our society can recover from the apathy cultivated by over-indulgence in television.

“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world … as in being able to remake ourselves.” Mahatma Gandhi said that. It is both reassuring and intimidating at the same time. It says we can be great without looking beyond ourselves and also that we have no excuse not to be great.

I like that notion of accountability. We are accountable for who we become and what impact we have on the world. I worry about these two things pretty often now. It isn’t enough just to drift from one experience to another. I want to feel my life has consequence.

Most of my friends care deeply about the notion that their lives will mean something. The only challenge is to sort out first what we consider meaningful and then to find a way to move in that direction.

Gadhi’s life meaning came to him on the day a racist train conductor mis-handled him in South Africa. That was enough of a push to make him an influential social revolutionary. I conclude from this that we should pay close attention to what makes us feel very strongly.

Tonight I discovered the website for the Good News Corporation, a 501c3 charitable organization that distributes to media outlets news stories about people and programs the promote well-being and happiness.

The project, which raises money from commercial media corporations and private donors, carries out one of the goals we at Cloud 9000 think is critical: inspiring people with stories of other people who are working to make the world a better, happier place.

It has featured such diverse people as Bono, Les Paul, Vartan Gregorian, Deepak Chopra, Leeza Gibbons, and Ted Turner. It carries a message of hope and inspiration to other media outlets. This kind of project, to publicize people who bring out the best in humankind. Too much news glorifies the wicked and self-serving.

How refreshing to find another organization that wants to show us all there are great role models in the world for helpful behavior.

The current issue of Sports Illustrated has a superb article on the Bluffton University baseball team, five of whose players were killed in a bus accident during their spring break trip to Florida. Bluffton is a Mennonite school in Ohio, and the article profiles the way the surviving team members, coaches, administration, and parents responded to what seems an utterly senseless tragedy.

The article identifies dozens of people, other schools, and companies that responded with generous help. A woman whose husband died in a plane crash of college athletes years ago, asked her employer, AirTran, to let her fly with the family members from Ohio to the hospital in Atlanta where the survivors were recuperating. Taylor University, which had lost athletes in a car crash the year before, sent counselors to the school to assist with grief counseling. Then they catered the cafeteria meals for the day of the school-wide memorial service so that all staff could attend. The baseball team of Bluffton’s arch-rival, Defiance College, collected money on the streets of their town to give to Bluffton. Ohio State’s baseball team donated gate receipts from their first home game. And on and on and on.

The team coach, James Grandey, said to Sports Illustrated, “Even as we were grieving we thought, Man there’s a lot of humanity in this world…I can tell ou this: for the rest of our lives, when something bad happens to someone else, we’re going to respond. How could we not, with the way we’ve been helped?”

It’s a very moving story, and one which celebrates community. First, there’s the community of the team, which banded together after the tragedy and are playing out their season. Then there’s the school supporting them, and then there’s the outside world. There are parallels to the Virginia Tech tragedy, and one of the inspiring takeaways from both is the number of people prepared to reach out and help strangers they’ve never met get through a very rough time.

Please read the story. I’m finding that Sports Illustrated is consistently one of the best sources of feature stories devoted to goodness in our society. It’s heartwarming and refreshing.

The April 16 New Yorker magazine has a short item in “The Talk of the Town” about German filmmaker Philip Groning’s 3-hour documentary about Carthusian monks, called “Into Great Silence.” The movie portrays–largely in silence–the lives of monks in the Grande Chartreuse monastery in France.

The film has become so popular at the Film Forum art movie house in Manhattan that the theater has extended it’s engagement indefinitely and now brings a Carthusian monk, named Father Michael Holleran, to the theater to host a Q&A session after some screenings. Father Holleran no longer lives in a monastery, but he spent 19 years in monasteries, in which speaking was only allowed a few hours each week.

After the movie screenings, members of the audience ask questions about what life is like in the monastery, “You guys are supposed to be celibate, right?” It’s fascinating to me, and encouraging, that so many New Yorkers want to see what it’s like to be a monk with a vow of silence. When I was in my twenties, becoming a monk appealed greatly to me, though never enough that I really considered going forward with it.

Still, the thought of retreating from the onslaught of words, messages, and intrusion on our thoughts and plans brings peace just in the thought of it. Our words, so much of the time, fall short of what we need them to construct. It would be nice, I sometimes think, if we didn’t have any responsibility but to do things, without speaking about them.

It would be nice. Maybe some day.

I often have Saturdays like today: I wait all week to tackle something I really want to do (clean up my study, write a poem, do a little work when there’s no time pressure), and instead I fritter away the time napping and watching TV. At my age that can seem like a giant game of chicken with one’s future.

People I know or used to know have achieved great things, while I’ve been treading water, and it’s taken me the better part of two years to come to terms with that. Even so, taking the step forward requires knowing what that step is.

Really this is about figuring out how to take uncertainty and transform it into decisive action. Hard work is one approach, and so is understanding what you really care about. It could be reading, or planting a garden, or taking a walk alone. It could be social–planning a dinner party, playing a sport, going on a trip with friends. Tonight all I really want is to go to sleep and wake up with a resolution to do something meaningful tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that.

What’s your secret for doing that? I’m sure lots of people would like to know.

American Idol is using its tremendous popularity with television viewers to raise money for poor children in Africa and the United States. The celebrities who judge the singers on the show, along with Ryan Seacrest who hosts the program, visited desperately poor children in South Africa, Kenya, and several parts of the US, including Louisiana, Kentucky, and Los Angeles.

Then they approached corporations (News Corp, Coca-Cola, Ford, AT&T, Allstate, ConAgra Foods, myspace.com, and ExxonMobil) who agreed to sponsor the fundraising. These companies gave millions of dollars. Tonight, the show encouraged its audience to call in and raise more money.

The stories profile beautiful children, who need our help. They are hopeful and determined. Many are orphans raising themselves. Many are sad, and the celebrities who participate are stunned by the hideous circumstances in which so many children live.

So at one point tonight, Ellen DeGeneres, who co-hosted part of the show, looked into the camera and challenged her wealthy friends to donate. Then she personally pledged $100,000 on the spot, and I started to cry.

It is powerfully moving to witness such generosity. You can help make life better for a child. Please consider making a donation here. (Or do it anywhere else–UNICEF, Save the Children, or your own church, synagogue, or mosque.)

Please give. It will make you feel good, and it will help a child live and dream.