William McDonough is my new hero. I want to help build and live in one of his cities. Read this Vanity Fair article and watch this video to better understand how his actions are the next step after Al Gore.
Al Gore is telling us the problem and Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart have the solution. I am inline with their vision.
by Elsa Joy Bailey
Daily Inspiration, Spiritual Growth, Spiritual laws, self
fulfillment, Personal Growth, spiritual inspiration
Imagine
a brilliantly colored world atlas
spread out, vast as a tablecloth,
across your dining room table.
You stand before it, peering at its
endless nooks and crannies,
its giant pools of blue water, looking over
the exotic and unfathomable names of cities
and countries beyond your awareness.
You take in the whole of this mammoth map,
parts of which are familiar as dust,
parts of which are completely alien.
And pretend you've been given an assignment:
to bless and forgive every piece of this huge map;
every name, every river, every mountain, every desert,
every village, every spa, every bridge, every coast,
every battleground, every street sign.
Now you can stop pretending.
Because in truth that's exactly the way it is.
You and I have been given such an assignment:
to forgive everything, everyone, everywhere.
That is our human potential.
You ask: but with a world that stretches
so many miles out of sight, with such an
immense list of characters and events,
how on earth do we accomplish such a
herculean task?
Piece by piece by piece.
Actually, it's simpler than it seems.
(Simpler -- but not easier.)
This world is much like a hologram,
which means that to entirely forgive
and bless the small piece of map
on which we stand and live
is to forgive the whole.
So we start right where we are.
Day by day, we are here to learn to see past
what our eyes and ears report;
to see through surface to essence.
We are learning to forgive it all.
The ripe lush strawberry that made us itch.
The pothole that tore a hole in our tire.
The grocery clerk with an attitude.
The relatives we try to avoid.
The co-worker who appears to hate us.
The newspaper report of a gang shooting.
The water bill that is inordinately high.
The washing machine that shrunk
our sweater into a doll's dress.
The driver that splashed mud on our new jacket.
The sun that refused to come out when we needed it.
The endlessly long line at our favorite restaurant.
The head that blocked our view at a concert.
The checkbook that doesn't add up.
The irate letter from a landlord.
Everything.
These are our daily assignments;
the extraordinary opportunities we are given
to see past the skin of all moments
and catch the shining innocence that waits beyond
and beneath the obvious
Is it easy work? No.
Does it take a long time to complete? Yes.
But of course we are given a lifetime
in which to do it.
And when we have moved through our
private map, piece by piece by piece, and,
with the help of the Divine Love at our center,
have come to release each face, each instance,
each folly -- what happens then?
Freedom.
We had a nice lunch today to say goodbye to Kelly, the best dog sitter in
the universe. Bob told me a great story about when he went to New York and
attended the David Letterman. It wasn't even the show that was the
highlight, it was the flaming hoops he had to jump through to become a
member of the audience. It was an all day affair, with what sounded like 10
screening line ups where he and Lisa were very slowly accepted as DL
audience material.
Hearing Bob talk about the audience reminded me of the dream I've had since
I was old enough to watch TV shows with laugh tracks or an audience; think
Three's Company, One Day at Time, The Jeffersons, etc. I've gone completely
off track of my goal. I need to do something quick before I fall into the
cavernous hole of the midlife crisis! Oh ya, the goal. The goal is to get
discovered as the greatest laugher of all time and make millions sitting in
audiences laughing all day and all night encouraging others to laugh. Is
that not the perfect job or what? What am I doing? I need to book a ticket
to New York pronto and explore this. Anyone want to join me?
