Circles of Family

“I need to tell you my story, and I need you to be strong.”

The words of a nameless woman in the Congo, passed on by Christine Schuler Deschryver at the Women and Peace Conference last weekend.

Born to a Congolese mother and a Belgian father, Christine’s an outspoken defender of human rights, especially for women and children. Since witnessing the rape and murder of her best friend in 2000, she's devoted her life (with the help of her husband) to alerting the world to the femicide and massive rape against women and children in the Congo.

The women who’s words I’ll never forget came into Christine’s office carrying nothing but a plastic bag. Having stated the terms of engagement, she told her story. That she was kidnapped with her husband and their four children. Her husband was killed in front of them, the others abused. After a time two of her children disappeared. When she went to the man in charge of the camp and asked him where are my children? She was told “You know the meat you’ve been eating..."

You know the beat that your heart skips when it goes cold. Before it recalibrates itself and directs the pain to be held elsewhere in your body. In the seconds that it took for Christine to relay that story, every single person in the room was plunged into the life she lives every single day.

She’s tall, beautiful, and her horror stricken face has arranged itself into a passive neutrality, so that she disappears to make way for the story she has to tell.

100,000 women and children a year are raped in the DCR, and in her words ‘they don’t mind regular rape, they’d be grateful for it.’ But what they have to endure has befuddled many of the surgeons who sew up the women as fast as the militia can rip them apart. Some will never be put back together, their insides blown up by rifle blasts. This situation is worse than some of the most infamous rape camps in the world. It’s not an exaggeration to call it femicide, the sexual torture and destruction of the female species. But it’s destroying everyone. The men who witness their wives being brutalised are never the same again. It affects the children even more, and of course the women who suffer this kind of violence are never able to bear children again. This is the kind of brutality that destroys the soul, and breaks whole families and communities.

Christine experienced a different kind of horror when she got into a cab on arriving in New York, to find that the cabbie didn’t know where the Congo was (something that will surprise New Yorkers not at all). She told him it’s in the heart of Africa, and Africa is in the heart of the world, and if you heal the heart you heal the whole body.

In the heart of the Hudson Valley, before the first day of Fall, women gather together every year, to walk our talk about waging peace, to support each other and find ways of staying true to who we are in the process.

This year we were joined by three of the five living women Nobel Peace Prize Winners (Betty Williams, Jody Williams, Rigoberta Menchu Tum), actresses like Jane Fonda, Kerry Washington, Lynn Cohen, academics like Carol Gilligan and Riane Eisler and we were once again hosted by two of my favourite activists, Eve Ensler and Elizabeth Lesser.

Let’s get the gender angle on the page. The F word is not one I’m shy of ascribing to myself but I prefer the W word. I’m a womanist, in the Alice Walker tradition, and every feminist/womanist in the gathering talked about the importance of men in our lives. We’re all fathers’ daughters, sons’ mothers, brothers’ sisters, husbands’ wives. We simply represent one half of the world to men, as they represent the other half to us.

None of the women we met was tragically woman. Not one of them bemoaned their lot or whined about being victims (to quote Maya “whining lets a brute know that a victim is in the neighbourhood”).

Every woman who spoke to us had a cause, and every one was a wordsmith, had found a way of using words to soften, crush, open, bludgeon their way to being heard. That was pretty much all they had in common.

The Nobel Laureates who couldn’t join us were Aung San Suu Kyi, who’s been under house arrest in Burma for the past 11 years, and Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was refused an entry visa by the US Government, an irony that was not lost on any of us. Two of the countries the world most needs to connect, the USA and Iran, and a peace prize winner, who wants to attend a conference on peace, is denied a visa ….

The Nobel Laureates came from a place of unadulterated originality, and they left me feeling that spiritual activism is clearly fueled by anger or by peace.

Jody Williams, awarded the prize for her work to eradicate landmines, is one angry dame. In a room filled with peace lovers, she was uncompromising. “You know what? Fuck inner peace. I’ll get inner peace when I’m dead. Right now I’m angry.”

Rigoberta Menchu Tum, winner of the Peace Prize for her work to end oppression in Guatemala, has the kind of peaceful energy the Dalai Lama brings to a room. She came to us fresh from fighting an election campaign, one she was doomed to lose, and one that had already caused the death by assassination of eleven people from her party.

An election adviser told her she’d need to engage a team of image consultants (cost $1 million) and advisors (cost $25 million). She was told that to win you have to promise things that don’t exist. Depending on the area of the country you’re campaigning in, votes can be bought for anything from two dollars to fifty. Her response was that she’s not a product, that she wouldn’t buy airtime or radio time in a country where her people were so impoverished, and importantly, that she would not buy a single vote. Life was given to her by a mother who was raped, tortured and killed, and a father who suffered the same fate. She also lost her brother to the struggle.

To see a woman in constant pain work against those in constant power, with a smile on her face, is nothing short of a miracle. When asked how she keeps going, she replied “I wake up every morning and I think what can I do to bother them today?”

Betty Williams is every Celtic woman you’ve ever met. She and Mairead Corrigan were jointly awarded the Peace Prize in 1976 for their work to bring peace to Northern Ireland. She was a receptionist who witnessed the horrific death of three innocent children, and from that moment has done nothing but work to relieve the suffering of the world’s children. But funny? You have no idea. Unapologetically herself, and a masterful storyteller. She’s a faithful Catholic with a devotion to Mary, a devotion that was triggered by an experience at the birth of her daughter. She lost so much blood she was unconscious and wired up, and her daughter was taken to the baby unit so she could sleep. Betty woke from the sleep to see a blue light in the corner of the room and heard the voice of Mary (“I didn’t know Mary was Irish.”) telling her that her baby needed her. She tore the wires from her body and went to find her baby, and when she arrived the baby was black and had stopped breathing. After the birth they had failed to clear the baby’s airways of mucus and fluid, and she was slowly choking to death. From that moment her faith has been complete, and as I often say, where there’s faith there’s no fear. This is one fearless woman.

She told us for example the story of meeting the Popes (plural). Invited to meet John Paul II at the Vatican, he began their conversation by leaning in and telling her he was very concerned about world hunger. Her response? "Sure, don't be - just sell a couple of Michelangelos". She calls Desmond Tutu 'the Arch', and does a lot of work with the Dalai Lama, so much so that last time she was with him in Dharamsala she said "Sure your Holiness is it not time you and I got married?" He replied that he thought he should find someone younger. She’s so fond of him she says that every morning she says her rosary, then does a little chant for His Holiness.

The final word from Nobel Laureates belongs to Aung San Soo Kyi, who says women get accused of talking too much. Maybe that’s what we need.

There were so many amazing people listening and talking for three days, I won’t attempt to capture all of them. Most potent though were women from conflict zones, like Christine from the Congo, like Carol Bebelle from New Orleans, and of course, like Malalai Joya from Afghanistan.

Malalai is a controversial Afghan politician and advocate for women's rights. She's only 28 years old, and has already been denounced and banned from parliament for calling the male politicians warlords and druglords to their faces, in a three minute speech that would alter her life. She told them they were worse than dogs.

After a stunned silence there was an uproar. Some of the male mujahideen, guns at their feet, rushed her, and she was ushered out of the building, put under the protection of the UN. Since then she has survived four assassination attempts, been branded an infidel and a communist, and travels in Afghanistan under a burqa and with armed guards. Despite the commands of Assembly Chairman, she still refuses to apologize for her words. When interviewed by the BBC a year ago, the notion of an apology was raised, and she said that an apology was indeed due.

To the dogs.

She wears the expression of one who knows her days are numbered. Words leave her mouth in a torrent, high pitched and strident and without pause. Like she only has a certain amount of time and needs to get her story and the story of her people out while she still has a voice.

She told us "They will kill me but they will not kill my voice, because it will be the voice of all Afghan women. You can cut the flower, but you cannot stop the coming of spring."

I gave a talk too, and seeing my name on the programme with these women was the most humbling experience. I joined them at the faculty dinner and shared a few brief but intimate conversations.

The stories we shared, and those I’ve passed on to you here, are in the modern oral tradition, the baton being passed. We laughed more than we cried, and the typically exclusive emotions of hope, despair and humour was the best ménage a trios I’ve ever experienced.

One of the funniest parts of the weekend was when Jane Fonda’s assistant came to me and said she'd been looking for me everywhere. Jane had a massage booked at 1 o'clock and wouldn't be able to make it, so she'd like to gift it to me, would that be ok? I'd met her briefly the night before, exchanging no more than a word, a look and a handshake. Thanks to Jane, and her uncanny perception, I put myself in the hands of her healer with gratitude.

You know you’re in the presence of greatness when the most commonplace thing in the room is intelligence. Each of the women we met is smart, funny, politicised, strong, soft, warm, uncompromising … Not one of them was a thin slice of woman, but whole, and in some way being of service, and surely that’s all any of us can hope for.

When I saw Michelle Shocked last month in London, she said that in her opinion there are five kinds of tears:

Tears of sorrow

Tears of joy

Tears of desperation/frustration

Tears of compassion

Tears of Travail

We cried tears for all of these reasons, but the important thing was we cried them with each other, for each other, and just knowing that your tears aren’t alone is comfort. I know we brought comfort to each other, but I know we also brought comfort to Christine, to Malalai, to Rigoberta and all of the women who came to get our attention.

Mother Teresa used to say “We draw the circle of our families too small.”

Hear. Hear.

On Fearlessness

All together now, it’s not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it.

What kind of person goes to a conference on fearlessness?

You’dathunk a lot of needy folk, the odd agraphobic (if it was home study), wimps anonymous …

As you now know I wasn’t my parents’ firstborn, but I was their first surviving child, and according to Adler and his successors, my place in the birth order ensured I’d be serious, conscientious, directive, goal-oriented, aggressive, rule-conscious, exacting, conservative, organized, responsible, jealous, fearful, high achieving, competitive, high in self-esteem, and anxious.

I often describe myself as a being a Buddhist before I knew what Buddhism meant. For one thing, despite being raised a staunch Catholic, I had a stauncher irreverence for both fear and guilt (the first of which depends on what’s ahead, the latter on what’s behind, and if you live in the moment, neither is appropriate).

And so I find myself in a room with nary a scaredy-cat in sight, and a platform that included the decidedly un-wussy Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Arianna Huffington and Nora Ephron.

I did a pre-conference one day intensive (not for the faint of heart, an intensive), studying the work of Teresa of Avila with Caroline Myss. Myss (pronounced Mace) famously became medically clairvoyant overnight, and was for many years a self-proclaimed medical intuitive, writing prolifically, appearing on Oprah, da woiks. If you haven’t read any of her work, Sacred Contracts is the book to start with. Her specialist subject is archetypes, and this book’s a great introduction to her take. She confessed to us that when she wrote this book she understood the Contracts, but not the Sacred part (despite being educated by nunsies and being a practising Catholic all her life). She’s a scholar and approached all she did fairly academically until recently when she experienced a visitation from Teresa. (No really, it’s a great story, true or not, and she tells it well). I find Myss an incredible teacher, wise, intuitive, bold, pioneering. Always note-less, spontaneous, and on this occasion a little more connected than I’ve seen her before. I’ve learned loads on the several occasions I’ve been with her and from reading some of her work, but I find her just as incredibly frustrating to listen to. Though now re-inventing herself as a mystic (her definition: one who experiences God rather than just knows God), she strikes me as a bully, typically a coward in drag, though in this case I don’t think that’s the provenance. She seems to lack compassion, takes cheap shots at those brave enough to question her or themselves. So the challenge is always to separate my dislike of her style from my interest in her work. The latest book is Entering the Castle, which I’ve embarked on. Built around Teresa’s own work on the Interior Castle as a metaphor for achieving spiritual perfection, I’ll let you know what I think when I’m done (reading it that is, not achieving spiritual perfection.)



Dame Jane Goodall is a UN Ambassador of Peace as well as founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, and she cherished the 45 minutes she spent with us. Her love for animals led her to study chimps and become the primatologist who redefined the relationship between humans and animals. As well as continuing to protect her beloved chimps and their habitats she now spends around 300 days a year travelling, speaking about her hope that humankind will solve the problems it’s imposed on the earth. I could have had earplugs in, because it was like being in the presence of a living saint. Again I’m confronted with the realisation that the people who have a message that’s bigger than they have no need for technique. Jane’s a perfect example as are the many who follow her over the weekend. All effortless grace and authenticity, unencumbered by the distraction of Ego.

Dame Jane and Al Gore were both introduced in the most original fashion I’ve ever seen, by Bobby McFerrin, who most of us know as the guy who wrote and performed the annoyingly upbeat ‘Don’t worry, be Happy.’ He is, however, a natural wonder of the music world, 10 Grammy Award winner and one of the world’s best known vocal innovators and improvisers. I can’t begin to describe his contribution, but it was kind of like watching a high wire act of angels playing speed chess. Awe-some.

Al had asked that the press leave for his talk so that he could speak off the record. His subject was the difference between legitimate fears and illusory fears. Addressing the location of fear in our brains (the amygdala) and the location of reason (the neo-cortex) he explained that fear to reason travels quick and hard, whereas traffic in the other direction is somewhat more fragile. (Just about with you up to here Al.) From there we went to the anterior singular part of the brain, where neurons react to pain when prodded. What’s apparently been proven is that the neurons also react when someone else’s brain is prodded, suggesting that we really are hardwired for empathy. Al for president. Seriously, in a country obsessed with determining the paternity of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby, a modicum of intelligence would not go amiss in Pennsylvania Avenue. And who knew he was so funny?

I did a workshop next day with Debbie Ford, who looks more like a regular on Days of our Lives or Desperate Housewives than a teacher. Tres Hollywood, writer of a lovely little book on Shadow that I read a few years ago (The Dark Side of the Light Chasers). The more funny, smart, articulate people I see, the less impressed I am with myself. It’s a dangerous line we tread between what’s true and what’s schmaltz, and Debbie treads it well in person, but a look at her website (www.debbieford.com) and you’ll see the line crossed. And double crossed.

Arianna Huffington is famous for a bunch of things, most recently as founder of the Huffington Post (www.Huffingtonpost.com). She was President of the Cambridge Union when she studied there, and pursued then lived with Bernard Levin, leaving him when he refused to marry her and give her children. She chose to move to the States and married millionaire Michael Huffington who won a seat as a Republican in the House of Representatives and narrowly lost a run for the US Senate. She divorced him in ’97 and he came out of the closet the following year.
She kept his name, their children, and a significant portion of his dough, and as he shifted sides sexually, she did so politically, going on to become a celebrity democrat and even being nominated for an Emmy for comedy writing with Al Franken and Bill Maher.

The latest of her fourteen books is titled ‘On Being Fearless’. Only a few days before she talked to us she’d fainted in her study, and showed up with a fractured cheekbone and six stitches in her eye. She gave an hysterical, smart, uncompromising account of her journey through fear and her repeated mastery of it, My favourite line? “If you’re a man, to be called ruthless you have to be John McCarthy. If you’re a woman you just need to put someone on hold.” Her message? The more we can be ourselves, as individuals, as citizens, as leaders, the better our chances. That the litmus test for the 2008 election will be if one of the candidates speak a clear, unequivocal sentence about who they are and what they believe in. If last week’s debate by the democratic presidential hopefuls is anything to go by, too much to ask.

To Sunday, when Samdhong Rinpoche, Prime Minister of the Tibetan Government in Exile talked about compassion as the source of Fearlessness. To say so little and so much is a real gift, and one I’m personally bent on understanding. I say too much too quick and it belittles the little I have to offer. I’m working on it. I go from there to a meditation on death (mine) with Elizabeth Lesser. (A busy ol’ day and it’s only lunchtime).

Undoubtedly the highlight of the day is a teaching with Yasuhiko Genku Kimura, a Zen Buddhist priest and integral philosopher (no Ken Wilbur leanings or associations I promise). This guy’s the real deal, and his workshop was on Osore, (oh-soar-ay), the word for Fear in Japanese, literally defined as O (soul of the universe, centre of your being) and ‘sore’ (to deviate or misalign), so that chronic fear is a chronic misalignment with our centre, when we objectify ourselves through Ego and falsely predicate our identity into this role. I’ve already booked an intensive weekend with Yasuhiko in October - he’s quite brilliant and teaches like a fast flowing river.

Nora Ephron should be required hearing for women everywhere. NY Times best selling author of Silkwood and Heartburn, writer of When Harry Met Sally, writer and director of Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. Like me, she’s the oldest of four sisters. I put down my moleskine and gave my full attention to laughter. She’s in her sixties, married happily third time around (all three husbands writers, the second and father of her children Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, the current, Nicholas Pileggi, writer of Goodfellas). Did I say hilarious? I can’t remember much, but she told us how the orgasm scene in Harry Met Sally came (ahem) about. She, director Rob Reiner, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan were talking about the scene on a conference call. The scene was written as a phone conversation between Harry and Sally, where she explains to him that women occasionally fake orgasms, and he assures her they don’t when they’re with him. As the four discussed the scene, Meg Ryan said “I think it would be funnier if she acted out the orgasm.” When Nora agreed, Meg added “and I think it should happen in a diner rather than over the phone.” At which point Billy Crystal said “and a woman at another table could say ‘I’ll have what she’s having’”, and Nora said to Rob Reiner “and she could be played by your mother” …. and that, of course, is exactly what happened.

If you find yourself in New York and want the city’s finest pastrami on rye, look for the table in Katz Deli with the plaque that reads “Congratulations – you’re sitting where Harry met Sally.” On the corner of East Houston and Ludlow.

For sure an over-simplification, but I left the weekend feeling affirmed that the answer to everything is to be yourself. Maybe not such a simplifcation if you recall that ‘Know Thyself’ is the invocation above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the secret that Socrates taught to Plato, and Plato taught to Aristotle, and Shakespeare adopted as his own, the advice in the Tao Te Ching that we can only know others by knowing ourselves. Letting your soul out of the bag seems to be the constant, whether the bag’s hemp or Chanel.

That everything is manageable when you are who you are, and that little is when you’re not. That usually the Self is in the background and the Ego in the foreground, when what we’re trying to achieve is Self as foreground, Ego as background.

Growing up as one of four sisters, one of our favourite films was, rather predictably, Little Women, and its writer Louisa May Alcott was herself one of four gals, who’s own take on fear was all any of us can aspire to:

“I’m not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”

Words from the world...

Awake and extremely dangerous in Zurich. Middle of the night, musing outranks slumber again. Stream of consciousness begins with ...... Ta Dah ..... (inspired title for a CD by the way, big up Scissor Sisters).

But whatever you do, do not buy this CD on 25th November. In fact DO NOT buy anything on 25th November because it’s ...

Every year, for 24 hours, we remember we were not born to shop, and join International Buy Nothing Day. At least, an interesting phenomenon, at best a test of the consumer led culture we’ve become, thanks to the Church of Immaculate Consumption. I dare you, buy nothing, not a sandwich, not a bus ticket, on Friday 25th November (needs a little preparation beforehand), and you’ll be joining like minded brothers and sisters all over the world in a day of rest.

Inspired hugely by Anna Lempriere’s beautiful link to Juan Mann (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e3Emjk3Zko%20%20), and my location, an idea envelopes me tonight. I'm staying on the banks of the Rhine, and as you look across to the other side of the river, you see Germany, the first village right there in view. A really short stretch. You could throw a stone across to the other side. Wonder what it must have been like to live here 60 years ago and how many people were shot trying to swim it. Makes me think of the borders of all war torn people. Wouldn't it be great if across all the war torn borders in all the world, we could stage a hug, one person from each side, one foot in each territory, bodies joined in a hug. Palestine and Israel, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Congo and Uganda, there are enough uneasy neighbours for a couple of dozen great pictures. Wouldn't that be awesome for when we’re teaching and talking about the need to connect with rather than control each other? Bet with the

1. Sophistication of the worldwide web and its tentacles
2. Network of contacts we have in our multi-national rolodex of friends

We could stage a kick ass photo-shoot. This is either a good idea or I need to go to sleep.

Life Writes Itself on Your Face.

I’m at the end of a trip, a long one. I saw two plays in NY. Wrecks, the new Neil La Bute, at the Public. One man play performed by Ed (La Beaut) Harris, beautifully eulogising his dead wife, staggered revelations of an internal monologue woven into his disapproving commentary on ‘the happenstance of life’ and the ‘way the universe likes to play it.’ Customary La Bute twist at the end is always welcome, however expected, and my friend Molly and Alan and I went to Indochine after to drink and think some more. Bumped into the playwright in the SoHo Grand a couple of mornings later and got to thank him personally. Ed’s the right kind of haggard. Connected.

The wrong kind of Haggard is Ted. Two weeks ago he stepped aside as senior pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church and resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, after a rent boy decided his hypocrisy was too much too bear. The hoisting of Father Ted’s petard was inspired by his consistent, vocal opposition to same sex unions, and after three years of being paid for sex and supplying metamphetamine, Mike Jones decided enough was enough and met the press. Gotta love that the church has ceded the moral high ground to a drug dealing gay hooker. His Sunday morning service the week before began with a prayer that ‘lies would be exposed.’ Be careful what you wish for Ted.

The Vertical Hour is David Hare’s new one, playing on Broadway starring Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy, directed by Sam Mendes. All that bloomin’ talent in one sentence, on one stage. Didn’t work. Hare’s play was surprisingly pedestrian and self important, full of lines that make clever people laugh at how clever they are. (“In America you’re building an empire. We’ve dismantled one.”) I think Julianne’s a fine actress on film, but she was dry and passionless and hard to watch. Can’t believe Sam Mendes let her go out with wet hair. Bill Nighy’s eccentric Englishman felt like an over-affectation at times, but if there was a show there he’d have stolen it. I ended up counting the Nicole Farhi props (all of them) and wardrobe (all of it). The whole thing looked good. Vacant.

Annie Liebovitz and Ron Mueck bring faces to life and death. The Brooklyn Museum’s currently housing both exhibits. Annie’s photos of both Susan Sontag and her father in death are juxtaposed with her own very-un-Demi-Moore pregnant belly (holding her first child, Annie aged 52). Ron’s portrayal of Dead Dad and the Giant Baby make a more gargantuan point. Faces all, naked, exposed, un-masked.

To Atlanta to visit our wonderful US Lawyer, who shows me what it means to be a human being as much as what it means to be a world class lawyer. Every so often she hosts an evening at her home, say for an artist who’s work she loves, I spoke at an evening there a year ago. This week she had a woman called Nan O’Connor, who’s just published a book called ‘A Walk in the Woods’, the story of an incest survivor. Nan must be sixty something now, and she’s a beautiful spirit. Gentle, kind, knowing, strong. She talked to us about the genesis of the book and her hopes for it. There’s no doubt in my mind that she’ll be sitting beside Oprah (another incest survivor) very soon. Walkinthewoods.org is the website, and if you know anyone who could use a walk in the woods with Nan, anyone who needs a compassionate home from which to heal, this is the place. You should know we’ve also made a donation to the website, to fund books for those incest survivors who don’t have the means to pay for them.

Finally, it wasn’t all work. Teddy and I had a blissed out week together, one of the highlights being the Halloween Parade in the village. As we walked back up West Houston to the pool hall where we misspent some of his youth, we passed St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church. As you know, the Catholics have a saint for every eventuality, and this one is invoked to guard against fires. Many believe he’s helped the village have less than its share. Hanging temporarily over the door of the church is a Peace to the World sign and the way it was framed, and the light of the moon, made me and Teddy stop. Later, in bed that night, when we were toasting our toes and our day, I remembered it. Said ‘wasn’t it a lovely moon tonight’. He agreed, all innocence and high voiced. And I followed through. “It’s never not a lovely moon. I mean there’s never a time you look at the moon and feel disappointed in it, whether it’s a sliver or incandescent, clouded or clear, the moon’s always a marvel isn’t it?”

As are we. Thin sliced or complete, wholehearted or only what we can give that day, we’re always marvels.

Night night.
X






Head into the dark...

Sitting in Canary Wharf in between students. It’s a dank, grey day. I’m playing Sigur Ros and pretending I’m in an Ingmar Bergman film ....

There’s a lot to be said for saying.

Saying things out loud. Embarking on a thought without knowing where it’s going. Especially in an atmosphere or a space where you feel free to do so, where you don’t feel not judged, but observed. It’s often not until you say things out loud, or write them down, that you stabilize your thinking, or maybe de-stabilize it.

As I hear me talk, I’m always on the lookout for anything that begins to feel untoward and for the past few months I’ve become increasingly convinced that the seven words I often reference when I’m teaching one of our classes have become less right than they felt when they were conceived. Of course they work, it’s not that they don’t, it’s just that the alchemy feels imbalanced and they feel too rigid, too categorical.

Presence, Charisma, Confidence, Conversation and Self all feel spacious enough to be interpreted with objectivity. The two words I have issues with are Action and Certitude. I think they arguably have a place, just one less higher up the hierarchy of aspirational words.

Action I describe as the difference between knowing what to do and doing what you know. The cliché suggesting ‘information is power’ has always felt like a pile of poop to me. Information is information, and I know a lot of clever people who are frankly not very powerful. It’s acting on the information that makes you powerful. You may know what will make you more successful, but not have the courage of your convictions. Until you do, they won’t empower you.

Certitude I talk about as a coalescing of three things ... Opinion, Certainty and Passion. It’s a pretty obvious talent when you ascribe it to Mrs Thatcher, and indeed it’s a perception held of Dubya by his fans, that you may not agree with him, but he’s absolutely, passionately convinced that he’s doing the right thing.

I think it can be misleading at times though, since often people with high certitude are those who sit back and ask incisive questions.

I can easily make a case for both of these words, but I’m relegating them.
Because I keep hearing myself say ... ‘these seven words are neither exhaustive nor comprehensive, and of course there are words I’d like to have a place at the table, but we only have a limited amount of time together. Words like Humility and Curiosity for example.” I must have expressed this sentiment a couple of dozen times before I realized I was trying to tell me something.

Humility is one of those words that’s come to mean something entirely different from its root, so the first thing to do is reappropriate it, and give it back its original definition. The word humility comes from the Latin word for the earth, "humus." To have humility is to acknowledge your grounding, to be proud of your humanity. It has nothing to do with lowliness, self-abasement, being overly mild or meek. In fact anyone who is subservient to everyone, and puts him or herself down isn’t humble. That kind of behaviour shows incredible ego, and constant claims of inferiority are frankly unbecoming.
Humility doesn’t hold you back. It suggests a sense of your own diminishing of Ego for the pursuit of something bigger. The greatest of those I talk about .... Gandhi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mandela, Maya .... All of them have tremendous humility and it’s viscerally recognised by people every time they talk about or watch such individuals so completely in their truth.

Today I’m checking out the Da Vinci exhibition at the V&A, and Curiosity was one of da Vinci’s seven principles for unlocking genius, the other six being:

• Arte/Scienza - Studying the science of art and the art of science (creatively using both sides of the brain)

• Dimostrazione, a commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

• Sensazione, the continual refinement of the senses.

• Sfumato (going up in smoke) – a willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, uncertainty.

• Corporalita – the cultivation of grace, fitness, poise.

• Connessione – an appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things

Curiosity is both a childlike preoccupation and a touchstone of one of the finest, most complete artists the world has ever known. I’m certainly more interested in what I can’t prove than what I can. Curiosity is a hunger for knowing and thinking more deeply, a state of mind that’s a question mark rather than a full stop. Rumi told us to “sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.”

If you feel you’ve arrived, you get it, you’ve ripened, the only thing left to do is to rot. Curiosity is for the ambitious, not determined by the greasy pole or the next big job, but ambition for being richer tomorrow than you are today. Every day.

So by all means Act with Certainty.

But then with your feet on the ground, head in to the dark.

An Inconvenient Truth

My letters from America aren’t as frequent or as colourful as America. And of course by America I mean New York. Get yourselves a cuppa.

Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth would be the perfect platform for him to wrest back the leadership of a country he won the first time around, though he swears he’s not interested in running again. I’d rather he did it than Hillary. I think the world’s desperately in need of some female energy, but I’m not sure having this woman in the White House would provide it. She may have a vagina but she’s slowly but surely taken the middle seat on just about every issue worth backsliding for. Dissenting voices are already being heard in the democrat ranks and the republicans don’t need any help to brand her brittle. I like Gore’s face and I like what he represents, penis notwithstanding. The documentary’s a powerpoint presentation on legs and utterly compelling.

At the Guggenheim Jackson Pollock and Zaha Hadid are sharing the space, Zaha with the lioness’ share. Wonder what they’d have made of each other. His work is shown under the title ‘No Limits, Just Edges’. Zaha is the only woman in a man’s world of architecture, and despite her middle eastern curves she’s most known for her aggressively angular work, edges up the wazoo. At id:ology we talk about swallowing metaphorical whales as a means to growing confidence (all the real Free Willies are our friends, honest guv). Feels to me like Zaha’s swallowing leviathans publicly, he swallowed the sauce till it drowned his. The Guggenheim’s the perfect space for both.

Then, two things happened.

First, Warren Buffet gave away $37 billion.

He was interviewed by Charlie Rose that night and talked about it. He sat alongside Bill and Melinda Gates, who’s foundation he’s asked to distribute the money. That in itself struck me as an incredible act of magnanimity. No ego demanding his name above the foundation’s door. If you’d seen him that night you would have seen a child. He was interrupting, he couldn’t sit still, giggling.





He’d famously said that he’d give away his fortune when he died, so when Charlie asked him ‘how’s your health?’, he said something like “I can’t believe how healthy I am. I don’t get enough sleep, my diet is terrible, I don’t get any exercise, but for some reason my health is great.” Like Karma had washed away this 74 year old body and left in its place a 6 year old boy.

He was so happy. He said “it doesn’t get any better than this.”

A week later, the day after the fireworks, Kenneth Lay died.

Due to be sentenced in September for conspiring to perpetuate one of the biggest frauds in US history, his heart exploded. Probably fear. It just couldn’t take the stress. His lavish lifestyle came under intense scrutiny, not least the fact that he withdrew $70 million dollars personally in the year that Enron slid into bankruptcy, the year that thousands of his employees watched their retirement funds disappear.

Such a jarring comparison between one wealthy individual and another. One who’s lived an impersonal life, a universal life, who believes that you only truly own what you give away.

The other suffering from affluenza, his focus on amassing, acquisition.

And if what I believe is true, that life writes itself on your face, take a long hard look at both.

Words of Mass Destruction

Maureen Dowd’s Op-Ed piece in the NY Times describes last Saturday’s Gridiron dinner in Washington. Mrs Cheney, wife of the Vice (and I mean Vice) President was giving a speech, and she said of her husband that he had a great sense of humour. “Just the other day I asked him, Do you know how many terrorists it takes to paint a wall? And he answered right back ‘It depends on how hard you throw them.’ Tres diplomatique, uh, Dick.

In this month’s Vanity Fair, there’s an article on the ‘sixteen words that changed the world.’ “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” If I tell you he made the word uranium sound like nucular, you’ll be left in no doubt as to the demagogue from whose lips the word stumbled.

And of course whilst no contender, Democrat or Republican, has officially thrown a hat in the ring for 2008, the rhetorical barbs have already begun. Hillary is being described by her opponents at every opportunity as ‘angry’ or ‘brittle’. In spite of the fact that she’ll have raised something in the region of $75 million for her campaign before it begins in earnest, a couple of relentlessly applied adjectives may just be her downfall.

With only 26 letters available to you, you can craft words that jab and gouge like Lynne Cheney’s. Words that devastate and diminish or those that evaporate in thin air. With those 26 symbols, billions of books have been written, billions more wait in pens, and still we live in a world of cavalier Woofing. Woofing’s an old black folklore term that describes the purposeless barking of dogs in the night. Listen in to most business meetings or Prime Minister’s Questions and you’ll hear lots of it … ego strutting and case making, with few who can truly be in a conversation, because most of them are trying to win the conversation.

Semantic abuse has emptied many of our words of their true meaning and they’ve been appropriated so the bland can lead the bland. Our immune systems are impervious to words like empowerment and synergy; to expressions like “our greatest assets go up and down in the elevators every day ….” I find it a great discipline when editing my own talks to do the Ricky Gervais test. Imagine your words in David Brent’s mouth and you’ll know whether they should be in yours.

Organisations over the last decade or so have spent countless millions on initiatives like 360 degree feedback (‘feedback’ in the sense of ‘bullshit’) Just as the additives we inject in to our foods to give them a longer life end up being the negatives that kill us quicker, the verbiage generated by endless forms do nothing but puff up corporate intelligence like Chelsea boys on steroids. It feeds into our need to control. To control our children, our diet, our workforce, the Middle East.

Real conversations are few and far between, because people are afraid of talking to each other. Small talk or big talk, we’ve become incapable of using words that reveal, rather than create who we are. We’ve always talked about writers, singers, artists ‘finding’ their voices. The same should be true of lawyers, bankers, politicians. And in every case, we need to forget control, and try to connect.

A year ago I went to see the play Stuff Happens at the National. David Hare’s take on the run up to the war in Iraq, its immediacy and the fact that much of the dialogue was actually spoken, make many of its characters comments crass in the extreme (the title taken from Donald Rumsfeld’s response to the chaos in Iraq). In one scene, Colin Powell spends four weeks in negotiation after the first US draft of Resolution 1441 is rejected by all fourteen other members of the Security Council. After seven weeks, arguments about the wording have reached a bitter stand-off. The French insist that there may be serious consequences should Iraq be in material breach of the resolution, as evidenced by “A false declaration ‘and’ a general failure to co-operate.”

The Americans prefer the word ‘or’.

The dispute over this single word lasts five days. Powell goes to Condoleeza Rice to get her take on the dispute over the word. Condi supposedly squares it with the President and on November 8th, Powell conceded the word ‘or’ and the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441.

Maybe it didn’t take 16 words to change the world, maybe it was just one.

If you want people to hang on to your every word, I’d suggest that you do. It’s better not knowing what to do with words than not knowing what you’ve done with them. Treat them with the reverence they deserve and they’ll be linguistic ambassadors. They’ll touch, inspire, stroke, heal, and above all, they’ll connect.

It’ll save you being a Dick.

Flip-flopping around

So, I’m on the A40 and I’m alternating between iPod and Radio 4 until my funk’s assaulted by the hyphenated euphemism that until recently was used only to describe beach footwear, but has now become a political slur of the highest order. Oh yes, the flip-flop. A term coined during the US election debates last year, and when I first heard it I knew I was present at the birth of a new phenomenon. The Republicans hit upon it mid way through their anti-Kerry campaign, and it entered the vernacular with all the precision of a Dick Cheney bullet. Pretty soon every journalist and anchor in the US was using it and Kerry’s reputation as an indecisive, mind-changing (read spineless, purpose-less) leader was forged. I came back to the UK and announced that it was only a matter of time before this new level of intellectual debate reached our shores, and sure enough, a month later it was being thrown lackadaisically at Charlie Kennedy. But until David Cameron arrived, the flip-flopping tag had failed to find a home. Labour have pounced on it as a strategy of undermining their new Nemesis, as they have on ‘National Security’ to use our fear and their superior ability to keep us safe as a vote winner.

Back on the other side of the pond, Hillary’s campaign hasn’t yet started in earnest, but she’s spent the last three years in the Senate modifying her political beliefs until they reach the neutral space that will make her a poll winner. Or at least not a vote loser. As the last two US elections have shown, it’s not about winning, it’s about not losing, not polarising opinion, not taking a stand that Americans don’t like. And Red-State friendly Mark Warner is sneaking quietly up from behind …… just don’t tell Simon Hughes.

I’m so OVER politics, almost over it enough to start a party, but there are probably too many skeletons in this closet. The endless dumb and dumbering down, the centrist pandering to voters, the lack of trust in institutions from the church, the state, the military, the ….. big brother house. Poor voter turnout during elections is too easily put down to apathy by political leaders ….. but a million people marching against the war is not apathy, it’s anger. Voter cynicism, however trenchant, is passion in disguise. Passion wearing black. It’s just hard to vote for someone when that someone looks and sounds so much like, well, everybody else.

Linguistically, this means lots of sentences beginning “Look, John, let me be quite clear.” “Look, John I’m afraid I don’t agree with that, but what I DO think is important is that ….” And the spin-meisters crank up the rpm.

Characteristically, it means you end up living someone else’s truth, mistaking it for your own. Spend less time looking up to others, and more looking into yourself.

Because you can’t fake leadership. Followers are too sophisticated for anything but the truth (with the possible exception of those 59 million or so who voted in the 43rd Pres).

If you do look at others, steer your gaze to those who are worthy of it. Ghandi’s ideals can be narrowed down to three …

Truth - Satyagraha, his policy of non-violence, literally translates as ‘fight for truth’.

Love - he believed in the inherent goodness of everyone.

Independence – not just for India, but for the individual.

From his white dhoti to his diet, his speeches to his marches, he lived and led by his Absolutes. When a journalist asked him to describe his message to the world, he said ‘My life is my message’.

And whether you like it or not, so is yours.

Oh and do me a favour?

Avoid homogeneity like you would Dick Cheney holding a rifle.

And never. Stop. Never use the term flip flop unless you’re packing for Ibiza.