PI is co-sponsoring this event and Sensei Fleet Maull will be speaking.
Check out the list of presenters!

Join us there!

from the website:

"Our goal is to provide a place for quiet contemplation for delegates, media, visitors and Colorado residents during the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado. We'll conduct a silent meditation retreat at Fishback Landing Park, just a 10 minute walk from the Convention.

Meditate 08 will run from Saturday, August 23 through Thursday, August 28, 2008. The retreat will include instruction and guidance by recognized meditation teachers from the Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu contemplative traditions."

“…we have family values…everyone in the family needs to be valued…” (Van Jones speaking about the upcoming election)

This morning I attended SL’s Netroots Nation and listened to an inspiring talk by Van Jones, who runs “Green for All” and has a very innovative plan and strategy for climate control and poverty..please check out the video when it appears

AND sign up for the Sept event at Green for all:

Green For All is a national organization dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

By advocating for local, state and federal commitment to job creation, job training, and entrepreneurial opportunities in the emerging green economy – especially for people from disadvantaged communities – Green For All fights both poverty and pollution at the same time.

Their goal is to ‘build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty”

This event was for me an amazing use of SL…the ability to attend a RL presentation (via stream) in the company of others from around the world accompanied by discussion. Sad part was only about 25 attended. In my opinion, Van Jones message is one that should be heard by millions (and inspire us all to action).

~Kate

Posted in Green Economy, Justice, Second Life | Tagged

The Lightness of Gravity
from the June/July Issue of Inside/Outside Magazine
by Anna Lauer Roy

"It was Father's Day 2006, the day my dad died."

". . . The world will rise and move; Watch it return to rest. All the flourishing things Will return to their source.

This return is peaceful; It is the flow of nature . . . "
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

On the morning of the day my father died, he looked up at the mountain we would climb and said, "God, I live for this." As it happened, he died for it too. But my father was not unfamiliar with paradox. In life, he tried to sit in stillness, at peace with unknowable truths, the Tao of nothingness that is everythingness too.

I try to give myself permission to believe that as he fell to his death off the north face of Mt. Gilpin (just outside of Ouray, Colorado), he fell in great stillness, at peace with knowing and not knowing, into the nothingness that is everythingness too.

In the last years of his life, especially, my dad rooted himself in three peacemaker's tenets: not knowing, bearing witness and loving action were his particular panaceas for the pain that humans inflict on each other, on ourselves.

In the last hours of his life, we finally spoke with candor about our family's contentious history. He answered questions I'd never dreamed I'd have the guts to ask. I found myself bearing witness to his words with an empathy I didn't know I was capable of. I did not finish his sentences with what I thought he was trying to say, presuming I could say it better. I was finally comfortable not knowing; comfortable just listening. I bore witness to his disappointment and pain. As I felt myself actually understanding his feelings, I felt freed from the chains children forge for themselves out of the metal of their parent's mistakes. For my father, knowing that I understood his actions was nice enough. For myself, knowing that I really understood shattered ugly patterns I had feared I would force myself to wear in every relationship of my life.

Just a short time after that watershed conversation, I bore witness to his fall of 3,000 feet when the rock outcropping he'd grasped for a handhold broke away. Mt. Gilpin is not a hard mountain to climb, it can be a casual day hike. But somehow we'd skirted around and gotten committed to the one vertical face on the whole damn peak. It was fairly vertical, fairly breakable, fairly insurmountable rock. And so we did not surmount it. My father fell, and I, climbing down trying to reach him, eventually cliffed out completely and was later rope-assisted the rest of the way down by search and rescue.

So I bore witness to our unalterable consequences. I watched mountains as I stood stranded high above my father's body. I breathed in mountains, and then I breathed them out again. I bore witness to the terrible grace of the basin that was formed from the mountain that had killed my father and its fellows. I accepted that sometimes insurmountable odds are not overcome, accepted as Lao Tzu said that in "gravity is the source of lightness." I tried hard to sit (or stand really) in stillness on that mountainside, because if I did not I would fall too; and because in sitting in stillness you sit with unknowable truths and nothingness and everythingness, too.

It was Father's Day 2006 the day my dad died. I felt pretty pissed to be left fatherless on that day in particular, and awash with guilt for not leading him up a different route, for not turning back sooner, for not catching him as he fell, for not getting to his body sooner. For Not. But I know too - as healthy biological creatures each know about self-preservation - that For Not is not a tenable place to reside. Rather it is Not Knowing that I must dwell on and dwell within.

I am celebrating my father on this Father's Day because he left me with a legacy of knowing I am loved, knowing the importance of bearing witness, and knowing the unity of opposites. And I am celebrating all fathers on this Father's Day because they represent one half of the creation story of all of us.

I am celebrating mountains on this Father's Day, because they at once ground us with a deep sense of place and let us ascend up and away from the ordinary ground. I am celebrating mountains because my father loved them so much that they are where he must have been meant to stay.

Anna Lauer is the former editor of the bilingual newspaper El Valle Hispanic News, which is out-of-print for the time being. She writes and works with kids on violence prevention in Pagosa Springs, when she is not gardening, building her off-the-grid, earth-sheltered home or climbing mountains.

David Kro Lauer was a graduate of our Integral Peacemaker Training certificate program and a long time social activist and community organizer.