7th Gen Blog

(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:

Well, the first leg of the journey is complete. I recently purchased a 1983 Mercedes Diesel station Wagon with somewhere over 128,000 miles on it.

While the next step is the biofuel conversion, just the change to this car has been pretty significant. When you sit in the driver’s seat you feel as if you’re slipping into an antique arm chair. You sink into the depth of something that someone else has been sitting in for much of their life.

Duke (the Chief Trim Tab Officer at Seventh Gen) and I spent 3 days in the SoL Executive Champions Workshop at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont. There were 20 exec types from all walks of life delving into the idea of creating (presencing) pragmatic global change...Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer authors of the book Presence led the workshop.