Aug 31
Aug 31
Sorry, but besides me, it’s in Dutch… Not the first time that has happened to me…
Aug 27
Ideas to change the world;re-designing the Picnic experience-
*travels{abroad}, Sweden, {abroad}knowmad 2 Comments »
This is from one of the most amazing days of my life. Taken in Stockholm, it says: “Ideas to change the world:”
You may recognize one contribution…
Another great day at Knowmads, hosting a World Cafe for idea generation on our Picnic proposal in the morning:
and, in the afternoon, dreaming up…
I think both are very much connected to the photo from above as well as the theme for this year’s Picnic event:
“The world around us is changing fast, and not all the changes are positive. We’re facing the biggest natural, social and economic challenges our world has ever seen. We’ve addressed some of these issues in the past, but the days of just talking are over. It’s time to take action.
We’re focusing on Life, Cities, Media and Design — areas that provide real opportunities to make a difference. PICNIC ’10 brings you a platform to create new solutions for a better world.
For more information on the event, click on the picture above, or check out the blog of Marcel Kampman of happykamping. Both creative director of the festival as well as ambassador of Knowmads, his website is definitely worth a peek. Thanks again to all the great guests Knowmads was able to welcome home on this exciting day!
Aug 02
a story of pilgrimage
*travels{abroad}, Israel, Netherlands, Spain, camino de santiago, palestine, {abroad}journey No Comments »Perhaps the best way to describe this city is like Amsterdam’s bitchier sister who is just as hot, but more in the ‘I can kick your ass’ kind of way. Rotterdam has chewed me up and spit me out, yet I still keep coming back for more. With gusts of salty wind, huge skyscrapers, and an impossible grind of cars, trams, and bicycles, she doesn’t give you the time to think. People aren’t strolling canals in circles, but crossing bridges with a direct destination in mind. Here, you work hard and you play hard. Any questions? If so, catch the nearest train back to Amsterdam; maybe someone up there will give you the time of day.
It’s not surprising, then, that I’ve reached the first obstacle of my trip here. Head spinning, my body lies like a rag on the sofa. My brain is fuzzy. The television plays movie after movie, as if on repeat. Maybe it is on repeat. I’m not sure. The flu medicine must be kicking in. Read the rest of this entry »
Jul 17
Glimpse, stories from {abroad}.
*travels{abroad}, France, India, Netherlands, Spain, camino de santiago, palestine, {abroad}art, {abroad}journey No Comments »
“The Glimpse Correspondents Program is for talented writers and photographers with a passion for storytelling and a knack for finding truly unique stories. The program is open to anyone between the ages of 18 and 36 who will be working, volunteering, or studying outside of their home country for at least 10 weeks.”
Here is a artistic statement written from the prompt:
“Why you are interested in being a Glimpse Correspondent? We also want to know what issues you hope to explore and/or what kinds of cultural adventures you hope to embark on.”
On Pilgrimage:
The ability to craft stories that create a meaningful connection between author, reader, and the snapshot moments spent with people on the path makes up my life. When it comes to using my talents in a passionate way and making a positive impact on the world, storytelling is more than my medium. Storytelling is my passion. There is a Zen belief affirming that upon leaping, a net will appear. This seems a fitting statement for the story. My extremely brief life has been a journey of leaps that led me to Amsterdam. After a long and bitter cold winter squatting with circus performers in Montreal, I became a Knowmad. As a nomadic knowledge worker at The New Business School for the World, my other passion for travel is used on a daily basis.
Joining an international team of young social entrepreneurs working and learning from each other has challenged me to “combine, passion, business, and playful learning,” as our motto states. Studying process design, social innovation and sustainability, new business design, personal leadership, and international project design, Knowmads aims to “educate change-makers.”
I continue exploring my learning journey that has brought me on pilgrimage with purpose. From Santiago to Varanasi, Palestine to Paris, I view life as pilgrimage. I’ve realized now on this journey that the destination never seems to arrive. Taking this approach to heart, I find myself constantly exploring this theme in my writing while listening to the life philosophies and stories of people from all over the world.
When it comes to travel, it’s often the people that make the place. As we continue flowing into an increasingly chaotic world, there’s a certain silence in the stories of people, all over the world. I believe this creates a story in the telling that no other medium can quite replicate. In story, a voice is given to the voiceless. In telling, a much louder sound emerges. This is a sound that holds more power than any army could possibly provide. As a storyteller, I am seeking autonomy from a society that has mastered the art of fear in the unknown through mass-management and hysteria in media and politics.
As I explore myself further through my craft, I also want to explore the broader implications travel has on socio-cultural interactions and innovations. Through bringing people together, there lies a necessity for an authentic cultural understanding. Through story, I attempt to break down the barriers and stigma modern culture and society has been spoon-fed by mainstream media. Through their telling, I hope to close the border between places and their people. I believe this responsibility is the natural step that can break down not just borders within myself, but also the borders within this world.
Jul 11
Vs.
Good luck in the World Cup to two places I call “home!” Am I showing enough neutrality with these images?
Jun 30
Doing is what I came to Knowmads to learn.
Energy is what I’m constantly exploring in myself and the world around me.
After a not so recent walk along the beach in Tel Aviv with a friend and spiritual mentor, Tsi-la, I learned a very beautiful metaphor for approaching each day. It is about energy renewal and the recent feeling of leaving a certain honeymoon period with my new company and school that I’ve spent the last two months getting started up.
Tsi-la says it’s about being an egg.
It’s wrapping yourself in blue, or whatever color you’re feeling, and filling yourself with gold. What does she mean by this? She explained to me that you must start with creating a solid and centered core filled with a gold that holds you strong so that you won’t fall, but also a gold strong enough to push out into the world; keeping in mind that gold must shine through the colorful filter that you wrap around yourself.
I asked her why you need a filter and why must it be colorful? She told me that the filter helps protect all that gold that you’ve filled yourself up with, strong for the day. It allows everything that helps the gold grow stronger, all the positive energy you’re given, and screens out any sign of something viral that may arouse feelings of fear, anger, hurt, resentment, jealousy, guilt, etc. All the lousy things, basically.
After learning this, I also came to the conclusion that the filter can also catch things and keep them stuck– like cheese in a cheese grater. Your filter should be strong enough to shelve these feelings, and look at them later when you are able to handle them. Even better, perhaps these feelings will melt away after awhile, using a little soap and hot water, the filter might be able to wash these things out once you realize that it’s not worth the battle later.
If I just take one day at a time, stress seems to cross my path much less frequently. There is one thing I’ve recently stopped doing that has reduced about 80% of the negative energy that sucks my day up. That one thing has been making to-do lists. The past few months have kept me so busy doing things that making a list of them just didn’t seem practical anymore. I attached so much negative energy towards these lists that never seemed to end, so I finally just stopped doing them, and man does it feel great!
Instead of to-do lists, I now make have-done lists instead. It was a piece of advice given to me by quite a few people and I like them much more. The things that you have done today rather than a list of things to-do. When it comes to time management, I’ve found To-do lists the most impractical things ever at this point. I always end up disappointed with what I didn’t accomplish that day. I first tried three important things a day, prioritizing my to do lists by size, and numerous other ‘to-do list techniques,’ but in the end I think I’ll stick to these have-done lists. It makes me realize just how much I have accomplished instead of what I haven’t. I think it’s a much better way to end each day.
It reminds me of what my most hospitable host, Gili, wrote to me in my notebook upon my departure from a great visit to Israel that marked the start of a new friendship:
I give thanks for this perfect day.Today is a day of completion.Miracles shall follow miracles,and wonders shall never cease to exist.
to today, everyone!
Jun 01
Finally, after three months, we are all TOGETHER!!!
May 10
Notes on a Pilgrimage: “everything is “alleged” here.”
*travels{abroad}, Israel, palestine, {abroad}journey 1 Comment »If I could give one theme to my life, Pilgrimage would be it. I see it as a broad way to view life as one long learning journey. I see it as a slow accretion of details; of knowledge and experience. I believe that by going slow, being present in each moment, lies the key to going “fast,” if you will. By taking the time to reflect and discover more of who you are and what you want to get out of this lifetime, dreams can be realized.
My dream is to live that sort of “life on pilgrimage” approach; to view each moment as bringing with it a new possibility.
Easter Sunday in Jerusalem brought with a new possibility, but not the possibility I has hoped for, exactly. It was a disappointing experience, to say the least. Perhaps I didn’t prepare enough for what I expected would be one of the most moving days to visit such a sacred site. Did I attempt to give it enough meaning for myself? To be honest, I really couldn’t find a way to make it “special”. Besides, I think to myself, what is “special” supposed to mean, anyways?
Perhaps, there were just too many shiny objects in the way for me to see what was really there. I was completely blown away by the amount of commercialism I found. Entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcre, people fought past each other mercilessly in an attempt to rub personal amulets against a rock where Jesus was “allegedly” crucified on.
It was a huge church; constructed around a rock. Enamored with expensive gold objects and artifacts telling the story of a simple man who loved the world so much, he made the ultimate sacrifice of letting go. Observing the masses of mourning pilgrims, a feeling comes over me. A tingle that slides down my spine bone. It’s the same sort of tingly goose-bumpy feeling that I got upon entering the grounds of the Vatican City. As my mother describes it:
“it’s the sort of feeling you get when you know you’ve come “home”, to a place that has been touched.”
Touched by what, though? What’s wrong with just having a rock in the middle of a room? What’s wrong with letting that be “enough?” What does “home” actually look like, anyways? Would Jesus have created this sacred space in the same way humanity has attempted to? Someone, or many people, have said:
“there is just enough religion in this world to create hate, but not quite enough to create love.”
Perhaps that’s true. The whole experience has left me feeling off balance, jaded, and questioning everything I ever thought travel, life, and belief was supposed to mean. In Jerusalem, international territory, finding co-existing means police barricades, weapons around every corner, and vendors hawking goods and services in your face; I can’t help but feel that there has to be more.
Within the narrow confines of the old city, women in hajibs wander between bare-shouldered babes from the Western world as old orthodox men ogle past to wail their wishes to the wall. Colorful scarves, tapestries, and t-shirts billow in the wind, from the light entering the labyrinth of the old city. Something seems eerily ersatz with the scene. Read the rest of this entry »
May 08
After a long night in Tel Aviv, the White City, I found myself in the back of an Israeli police car. Within two hours of my departure from the airport. With two other Americans and a Portuguese South African girl, who was wearing a miniskirt shorter than my bandana. We ran out of gas. Jet-lagged, I am still amused as we push the car across three lanes of speeding traffic at two in the morning. The girl in the short skirt and heels longer than my forearm? Not as much. After spending two hours at the airport checkpoint trying to pick me up, the three of them were definitely not when the the flashing lights appeared. This only heralded more glorified authority figures. This was something they had become very accustomed to.
Driving a car owned by a Palestinian Israeli with expired plates and no insurance didn’t make the matter any better. For my friends, working as teachers for the “other side” means developing an elaborate lie at every checkpoint. When they are in Israel, their complete lives are a lie. Luckily, the short skirt is a long enough veil to cover our story as we get towed off the freeway and are brought gas- free of charge. We are happy the police helped us “Western” tourists out. We breathe easy and decide that, by four a.m., going out is no longer worth it. Speeding off, we pass without problem past a checkpoint entering Ramallah. I now feel part of a secret. I can feel the big elephant in the room, but it’s dark and I am speechless. Seeing parts of it only make it harder to give words to it’s enormous presence.
It’s an eerie experience that I can finally say I’ve come to “know.” Whatever that actually means. After the brief stay is said and done, I ask, where can I find my truth in it all? I feel baffled and brainwashed by this situation. After leaving Jerusalem on Friday to go back to where my friend Curtis is in the West Bank, I find myself breathing better and experiencing a hospitality that I will not easily forget. The people are kind, the police don’t intimidate, and I feel like I’ve left the situation knowing a lot less than I did before. After writing all of this, I feel I’ve processed something. I’m content with the confusion, the complexity of the situation. I know nothing, actually.
Having dinner with Curtis, his friend Kaitlin from Reno, and her Palestinian-American boyfriend, I feel like I could live here for another forty years and still not completely understand everything that is happening here. This is just a taste and I’ve savored as much as I can for now, but this is a seven-course French dining experience, and I’ve only tried the appetizer. Hearing the verbal portraits of persecution and experiences from the Palestinian, I am numb. Recalling bits and pieces from his memory of the uprising, running from bullets, and throwing stones at strangers entering his sacred land finds me frozen. Sleeping until late in the morning, I sweat out a fever and awake from a horrible nightmare. Little did I know, that I would soon be entering a new dream, a glimpse into another world.
This one, much more real, however. I get a call from the American girl I had dinner with the previous night. She invites me to paint Palestinian children’s faces at a nearby refugee camp she volunteers at. In the taxi on the way there, I ask her why she does this:
“It’s a way to make at least a little instant change. To make a place a little better than before. It’s a place where the children know they can’t leave, but can’t fathom why. They simply want to go to the beach, but the beach is impossible. The beach is in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is a world away.”
Each week, she goes there to the delight of dozens of children whose biggest requests are a very patriotic flag of Palestine, but also rainbows, flowers, and kitten faces. We had a great afternoon together and I became an expert at painting a Palestinian flag and learning the colors in Arabic. The situation is complex at best. It’s complicated to most from the outside.
Passing through the barren border today, I lost my coins in the metal detector that lacked baskets, showing my ID to a windowed soldier. Catching the next bus to Jerusalem, without coins, I was paid for by the Palestinian gentleman in front of me who helped me through the degrading border crossing. After leaving the scene? I can only determine that healing the situation requires justice and dignity; rightfully served to each “side.” A “no one is right, no one is wrong” approach must be taken. As I leave Jerusalem, I say a silent prayer at sunset and board the bus towards Tel Aviv, the New York City of the Middle East. Nightfall curves along the mountain pass as the lights of the city signal my arrival.
