The word is out: We want project of chicken. What? Project of chicken!

Our women's group will put together the little savings it has and buy chickens together. After keeping them in a chicken house, feeding them chicken food and having chicken light bulbs shining over them for 40 days, they will be ready to sell.   Read more...

I join Robin and Joris in visiting Ala’s house. We have a question for him and, I’m curious to see how he lives. Ala is our translator and one of our bridges to the community. He studies at the Arab American University. He is one of those people whose bright eyes betray a busy inner life. It’s after sunset, and as we walk, the streetlights switch off. Power cut.

There are around 10 people in the room, all men. Brothers, cousins, Ala’s father, an uncle and a neighbor. We sit down, and at once I feel tense about the situation. Where do I hide my female self?   Read more...

Hotel Wal-Mart from B-Rilla on Vimeo.

I'm currently in Missoula, Montana and we just spent the night at a Walmart parking lot. It's actually our 5th or 6th night at a Walmart parking lot. I'm not too sure.   Read more...

Has it ever happened for you that you’ve picked up a book, usually a highly recommended one, read it and disliked it? It’s rare for me. Such was my first response to Eckhart Tolle’s original offering, The Power of Now. More than five years have elapsed since then and since I loved his second book, I thought the first deserved a retry. Either I’m totally different or I wasn’t ready before. It’s a book packed with wisdom.

Interestingly, what I couldn’t do was read it all in a row. It’s structured in Q & A. Starting in January of this year, I read a question and an answer a day. Then, I’d sit with them. It took me almost four months to read the whole thing.   Read more...

“Have you ever been in a country more miserable than ours?”

I am facilitating a meeting with Palestinian women in the Westbank. They are describing their situation to me. Their village is a 2,000 heads big community up in the hills with very few facilities. The Israeli occupation has a big impact on their daily lives. It is impossible to travel outside the Westbank without a special permit. The men who used to work in Israel until a few years ago are now sitting at home idly. There is an unemployment rate of 58% in the area. The women keep their heads up and work hard to keep their big families fed and educated.   Read more...

That was the scene last Saturday April 18th at 6:30am underneath Astoria’s famous landmark, the Washington Bridge. Carla Oja and her Chief of Police husband, Alan, literally following us across the 4 ½ mile expanse between Oregon and Washington, with flashing red and blues to ensure we made it in style to run our last State.

How’d we get to do this you may be asking?   Read more...

The Preemptive Love Coalition began with a little girl in Iraq dying of a congenital heart disease. In the early summer months of 2007, I sat in the Palace Hotel in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, with a man and his little girl. The meeting had been arranged by a tea-maker I had befriended in the hotel when he learned that I had contacts who might help get this little girl out of the country for the life-saving heart surgery she had been waiting on her entire life.   Read more...

Let me tell you about a guy named Don. He is the perfect candidate for the tour’s “local hero” category. In fact, this guy named Don could be awarded with the title of, “the originator of what it means to be a local hero.” You see our friend Don Grant has all the qualities of what a local hero brings to the table:

• Lives local (Burnaby BC)
• Has a family (an awesome wife and kid to match)
• Works with many people in the community (way beyond 9-5)
• Coached hockey for many years (pretty Canadian, eh?)
• Goes way out of his way for anyone in need of his talents (often)
• Is humble in his ways but accomplishes way more than what most in his profession profess to do
• Is the kind of guy you know you can always count on, when you really need him

I love this quote, by Janusz Korczak. “Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today. They are entitled to be taken seriously. They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect, as equals.” I am reminded almost on a daily basis that children are not treated as equals. Just in the last few days, my kids have been treated disrespectfully.

We went to the bank the other day because my son wanted to get a debit card so that he could use it instead of carrying cash around with him. The money in the account was his money that he had saved. The woman that helped us asked him how old he was in a patronizing voice. It was as if she was implying that he wasn’t old enough to be responsible for a debit card. He answered that he was 11. From then on, she kept talking to me, instead of him. She asked me if he should have full access with the card. She quickly said it was up to me. I looked at my son, and he looked confused. It is HIS money, why shouldn’t he have full access to it? I told her, yes, he should have full access, as it is his money. She kept asking me if I wanted to take other “precautions,” implying that I needed to make sure he doesn’t spend more than what is in his account. The whole encounter just felt so negative. I kept thinking to myself that she would never have treated me this way, why is it okay to treat my son this way? It was all about assumptions.   Read more...

We woke up yesterday in El Centro and headed into Calexico to see the graveyard where the unidentified migrants found in that area are buried. They are found by the border patrol and taken to the County Coroner's Office and then sent to this grave site. I had contacted Calexico's Coroner's Office last month to see if they would grant me an interview during this trip. They politely declined. The officer I spoke to said he was "suspicious" of what I was doing, a doctor traveling with musicians to the border to do a project.

"Suspicious"--of what? Making music? Or practicing medicine? Of forming my own opinions based upon my reading, questioning and experience? Probably all of it.   Read more...

Talking to the cemetary groundskeeper in el centro, It hit home just how over-politicized immigration has become. It is what politicians and pundits call a "wedge issue".

At one point he said "they're not bad people. They just want to work." and then "no offense, but you don't see white people in the fields picking crops. They don't want those jobs."   Read more...

I'm up early this morning in El Centro. We drove here last night from Tijuana. The rest of our time in Tijuana was profound.

I met a young man who was in the sick room at the Casa del Migrante. His name is Roman Tlapa Ortiz. He's 22 years old and will likely never walk properly again. He had originally crossed the border into the US when he was 16 years old to work in Los Angeles as a metal worker. He made $12/hour working 40 hours a week and sent most of that money home to his family. In Mexico, the same kind of labor would pay him anywhere between $5-15 a day.   Read more...

We made it Tijuana yesterday and spent the end of the day at the beach, talking with people who were preparing to cross the border and taking photos of the place where the US-Mexico border enters the water. It was amazing to talk with this one man who was waiting for night to fall before he and his wife tried to cross along the beach. She is 6 months pregnant and they have 3 other children who were born and live in the US who they were trying to rejoin after having been deported. The openness of the people we spoke to was wonderful. They felt it was important to simply tell their stories and it felt good to receive them with open minds.   Read more...

Rupa & the April Fishes is a San Francisco-based, folk rock/latin fusion band described as "slinky, fevered, hypnotic and intoxicating." Recently, they've begun a socio-musical tour along the US Mexico border, from Tijuana to Texas and beyond. The tour, "Por La Frontera," will include an across-the-border concert, with half the band playing in Tijuana and half in San Diego. Each concert in the tour will be a multi-media event that combines music with video projections created by documentary photographer Lars Howlett.   Read more...

In my childhood home, we had two items that my mother put on display every spring. They were a pair of trees. The stems were made of twisted silver fibers, while the blossoms were of transparent pink glass. The light shimmering through those weeping branches created an aura of mystery and magical beauty. My mother explained they came from far away Japan, which made them all the more special for us small-town children in that era before Internet and easy world travel.

Years later, I ended up living in that Far Eastern culture, whose seeds had been planted in my psyche at such an early age. And every spring when I see the gracious weeping cherries here, I remember my family’s lovely glass trees.   Read more...

Do you read the ezine Greater Good? The issue that arrived in my inbox last week had two titles that intrigued me: “Why is there Peace?” and “You talkin’ to me?” Of course, I eagerly clicked on things till the first article came up. My reading slowed as I understood the topic. Same for the second article. Why?

Because they were both about nonviolence.   Read more...

Is Love truly a rapture that transforms the very core of one’s being? Is it as deep, transcendent and incredible, as the writers and poets would have us believe?

The question of "what is love?" has put the imaginations of the greatest poets and philosophers in a spin for more than two thousand years and they are still groping for a definite answer… Love, if you ask me, is fundamentally unknowable. The greatest mystery of humankind. Elusive. Hard to define and confine.   Read more...

In 2004, a friend gave me the debut album of the English guitar rock band, Razorlight. I was immediately struck by the energy of the music. Enthusiastic music, every song getting to a wild climax. 3 years later, they released their second album and this time the music press caught them and wrote them up to the sky. They became very popular and played all over the world in ten-thousand-people halls. A promising future ahead of 4 young musicians. Now, 5 years later, the press has dropped them already, (they found new heroes) and Razorlight does not even sell out the 1,000-person venue where I am watching them tonight.

But still… their music is full of energy, the musicians play like every song is their last song, like the have to give all their energy. The crowd hardly moves, the audience doesn’t sing the songs along like they did 2 years ago, but still… they are playing like this could be their last contribution to the world.   Read more...

I loved this photograph I found on a blog called One Million Peace Signs. The commentary asks, “Who’s peacing who?” Reflections of peace in two mirrors, and one of the reflectors is also the photographer!

Peace, my friend, often requires reflection, a luxury for many of us whose lives are too scheduled to make time for such an activity of Being, not doing.   Read more...

Alec, the online intern at Ode, posed this question to me a few weeks ago when we stopped by for a lunch-hour hello and some awesome eats with the rest of the amazing gang at Ode in Mill Valley!

Alec’s question is one Steph and I get asked a lot in our presentations, a lot like some of the honest questions from our pint-sized eco warriors, the elementary school kids! Since they're curious about the run's details, they ask “where do you guys sleep” or, “where do you go to the bathroom?” I love the straight-shooting questions of an 8 year old. We also get asked, how long do we run each day, how much food do we eat and our personal favorite, how many days did it take to get ready for the biggest journey of our lives, thus far?   Read more...

The main thing I love about unschooling my kids is that they have the opportunity to try out many different things at their own pace. I love the idea of them discovering who they are and what they love to do. They do not have to start and stop activities when someone else tells them to. If they start something and hate it, they stop. They don't have to stick it out or finish what they started. I don't want them to learn that the world is a negative place, I want them to learn that they don't have to do things that make them miserable and unhappy. I hear people saying, “but they will have to learn that lesson!” Will they?   Read more...

About a two weeks ago, we found ourselves in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was one of those days that I'll never forget.   Read more...

Through reviews of her lovely books, I have become email friends with one of our national treasures, Ruth Gendler. Part of the service she performs for humanity is in our schools. She brings her artistry into classrooms and inspires the talents and imaginations of our youth who, in my opinion, sorely need it.

One of Ruth’s delicious books is called The Book of Qualities. It inspires me and it inspires her work in the schools. Children write what Ruth calls, “Qualities.” Knowing of my commitment to peace, Ruth sent me this poem by third-grader Alex Trux. She was writing on the quality of Peace. We have permission from Alex’s mother to quote her astonishing writing.   Read more...

Several years ago, I wrote about my friend Ichinohe, the healer. Since that essay appeared, my beloved friend has gone through many profound changes. One time, when I went for a massage, he said, “I know my body very well. There is something wrong with me. I must go for a check-up.” And sure enough, that investigation revealed a beautiful, perfectly formed spiral pattern of teeny cells spread out across the lining of his intestines. Cancer. When he told me about it, he said, “The doctor was amazed. He had never seen anything like it. And indeed, it was magnificent. It looked like the galaxies. It formed a perfect, balanced arrangement.”

I personally felt that orderliness came from Ichinohe’s years of meditation and deep spiritual attunement. But why cancer? Why something so lethal for someone who had devoted his life to healing others?   Read more...

As the title states, we found ourselves yesterday in Ukiah, California, blending old world tradition with street realities by way of two school presentations within one event day.

The night before we’d time-traveled back 3,000 years to sleep in ancient China at the Buddhist Community called 10,000 Buddhas. We were lulled to sleep by the distant calls of peacocks looking for their partner to sleep for the night in the trees above where we parked. It’s the craziest feeling, as we instantly were transported backwards thousands of years when we entered the compound’s massive wooden gates, guarding what felt like an ancient, sacred place. Check out the pictures!   Read more...