Ride for Meaningful Climate Change Legislation

During the week of September 20th, my friend Jake Stewart, will be participating in the 1st annual Climate Ride. On Sept 20th, he will join others to start a 300+ mile bicycle journey from New York City to Washington, DC. They will be delivering a unified and non-partisan message to the Capital encouraging our government to adopt meaningful climate change and renewable energy legislation.

Jake shares a personal blurb of why he's riding in this event and why he's asking for support:

I sincerely believe there are few issues more important to future generations than ensuring a stable climate and healthy planet. This is not a partisan issue, this is purely a Human issue and there is nothing that we share more commonly than the planet that sustains us. In that light, I'm convinced that we can overcome the many standing hurdles if we come together in a positive way.

Progress is being made. In fact, despite fervent protest from oil & coal interests, even the few remaining figures that remained hesitant of climate change action (President Bush, etc) are now publicly acknowledging that the science is overwhelming: climate change is happening and it is being driven largely by human activity. The good news is that scientists have determined we can slow down and possibly reverse the global warming process that man has set in motion. But we must take substantial and immediate action to reduce the almost 10 billion tons of fossilized carbon we are releasing to the atmosphere every year.

I'm optimistic that we will rise to this challenge and that America will take a leadership role in this effort. In a small nutshell, that's why I am riding and asking for your help.

If you'd like to donate to Jakes ride, you can do so here.

Some more background and info:

About Climate Ride
Today's climate change reality
Why we must act now

Integrating Man's Control of Order with Nature's Mastery of Order

If you're in the Seattle Area, I highly recommend a trip to this year's Seattle International Children's Festival to experience contemplative juggler, Thomas Arthur May 17 - 19. For a taste, you can watch some recent television appearances here and here (for the second one, skip ahead to 31:31)

"In a wondrous dance of animate objects and projected image, Luminous Edge tells the story of a Wizard's apprentice and his struggle to learn new ways of being in a world on the verge of collapse. How do we learn to cooperate with the natural flow instead of trying to control it? The apprentice seeks to integrate the genius and skill of the Wizard with the heart of the Shaman as he explores magical patterns reflected in geometric shapes and natural objects.

Luminous Edge is a playful, hopeful exploration of the environmental and social problems facing our world today, a call to bring the wisdom of science into the heart of soul and community."

Although this work has been created for the children's festival, it will definitely appeal to adults as well and I highly recommend purchasing tickets and joining us for the experience.


At this performance you will be swept about by breathtakingly beautiful images of nature, forms of movement, and inquiries of existence.

In the meantime, here is a picture of Angkor Thom, Cambodia brought to us by Day and Night Painter. It's another sacred place that shows the connection between man's control and nature's power... and it also leaves me in awe.

A Story from the Salon

I had my first experience of hosting a large event when I was at the Evolutionary Salon. I was fortunate to be a part of an amazing team of four. We hosted the final day and for each of us it was a powerful experience... as Peggy came to name it, a shamanic act of creation. In order to tell our story, we each wrote our own individual story and then I wove them together into one luscious tale! This story now lives at a new webl, Stories from the Field of Hosting, as well as at the Evolutionary Nexus site.

The dedicated hosting team for the final day of the 2nd Evolutionary Salon, Peggy Holman, Finn Voldtofte, Tree Fitzpatrick, and Ashley Cooper, share a flow of thoughts on how we each experienced that last morning. We each wrote with the intention to tell our individual story and then for them to be merged and woven together, ending up as one story about what happened in the final stages of the salon gathering, in service of the ongoing, communitywide holding of the space for what emerged, and still is emerging.