7th Gen Blog

The expansive time and space of the long Labor Day weekend has faded, almost as if it never happened. Where does the past actually go other than taking up some space somewhere in my mind? I’m 36,000 feet up in the sky generating CO2 emissions that I’ll have to offset. The expansiveness has now moved from my mind to the picture outside my window. The sun just dipped down below the horizon. We aren’t heading West fast enough to keep it in sight as I fly in the late afternoon from Washington DC to Seattle, where I will head out to Cortes Island, off the Vancouver coast, to give a talk at the Hollyhock Institute.

In a few short days I have marched 10 miles in a Global Warming action, met with the head of labor’s largest union, spent 2 ½ days in a Greenpeace Board meeting, and tried to exercise and meditate enough to keep my head in a place that allows me to keep contributing to the creation of a future that my three children will want to live in.

On a mostly sunny late afternoon last week, Peter Senge
and I crossed paths at Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, where he was vacationing with his family, and I was attending a management retreat. As frequent readers of the Inspired Protagonist know, I’m a huge fan of Peter’s. During the conversation he shared two thoughts on strategic planning that resonated with me since that’s what I was in Stowe trying to do.

(Note: I wrote this over the Labor Day weekend, and I've been debating about whether to post it until just now. Please let me know what you think.)

The remnants of a hurricane blow through northern New England leaving the sky cloudy and the ground damp. The temperature isn’t quite cool enough for a bath, but I take several anyway to escape to that clearly defined warm space. The endless possibility leaves me at a loss for where I fit into the huge landscape. While my place is so well defined in other people’s minds, it is unclear in my own. The empty space of a long weekend extends the uncertainty. So I write to see what I write in the hope that the formality of the words on this page will reveal something that seems to escape the informality of my mind.

The rapid movement of the work week is easier. It leaves few unfilled spaces and little time to recalibrate my purpose and meaning in the universe. But somehow that place of reflection is always where I return to over and over, year after year. Given enough time and space the same question reemerges. The mind that asks it may be different, but the question remains remarkably the same. I, of course, have answers. But none that I choose to attach myself to.

Here are some more reflections from students from our July ChangeIt program with Greenpeace. There is the montage v-log, and the written piece below. --WR

From Laura Noll: