serendipityoucity

This was a hoot to find!  Especially when you realize that you occupied half a page of a newspaper with over two million readers internationally - in the days before the Internet was huge!  It is also fun to re-evaluate what you said a bunch of years ago and realize that it was not so bad, and that in fact you still live by those words in one way or another!  Almost like those old movies, only the background scene changes but not the ideas on the front.  Unfortunately, some of the ideas are still considered radical and well, i feel like i am continuously repeating what i have said years ago!  Why bother with the new sometimes if we can’t even implement the good stuff we already know!

It’s really fun to read old stuff like this.  Here are some quotes, that still reflect what I think today, only now I know a few more big words - tuition will get you that!

Thrift was a virtue until consumerism put it out of fashion. 

Oops! I have strayed from this one a bit, I think I need to get back to it, the shoes, outfits and lipstick get me every time! 

"Take a tree", she continued.  "It can offer wind protection, hide a bad view, give us wood, fruit, nitrogen.  If we plant one tree into each our lives it will work for us in so many ways.  Apply this to Tokyo - say 12 million new trees in gardens, on the top of buildings, waste ground, and you help resolve pollution and boost resources".

When living on the Island of Boracay in the Philippines, a microcosm of what was happening at a larger scale globally, it got me thinking about systems.  Island living, especially on a really small one like Boracay, you clearly see what comes in, what accumulates in the garbage.  You can smell the presence of overpopulation, you wonder how a landless carpenter can live on 20 pesos a day when a mango grown locally costs 16 pesos, what happens to the groundwater when thousands of people arrive on mass during the tourist season.  What impressed me most was the proliferation of fences, I used to walk the island at night barefoot without a flashligt, but as fences got build i would get cuts, lost and blocked from passage!

"I’ve always been attracted to mysteries and puzzles.  For a long time I lay in my hammock, dreaming of how to resolve the mess we appeared to have gotten ourselves into, how to develop people’s potential to get a job done in the best possible way".

I still think it is possible to give the street dwellers in Manilla the old abandoned buildings, and together renovate these.  Imagine street people learning trades like electrical, plumbing, construction, carpentry, design while learning to build their own homes, class rooms, bakeries, collective kitchens, rooftop gardens and so on.  I recently saw the movie The Take, which just re-affirmed that I was not completely off the wall with my dreaming.  Kids still live on smokey mountain - unrealized dreams but there are a few new ideas.  Boracay now has hotels with pools on it and only grows a few papaya! Yikes!  It was such a beautiful near pristine paradise.

She works locally and imaginatively with a long term perspective.

Some people argue that my 10 000 plan of culture shifting and habit modification is unrealistic!  Lacking vision i say

In experimenting in her own life she is advertising alternatives.  It’s no good arguing against nuclear energy, for example without offering something positive in its place; that’s unrealistic.  But until each of us does something, nothing will happen, nothing will change!

Ok back to work now! I am not being the best example these days!