March 15th, 2009

Peet’s Coffee happens to be one of my favorite blog inspiring hang out’s. And today it is again. I have just returned from:

1. 15 minutes ago – meeting with my friend, Lisa
2. 4 hours ago – lunch with my sensei, Richard, after two hours of training at the new Aikido of Tamalpais www.TamAikido.org
3. 2 days ago – spending forty-eight hours with my two oldest children, Pete and Cari, and their respective clans numbering six kiddo’s of their own … and soon to be increased by one (that’ll be Cari’s third)
4. 6 days ago – returning from a few days in Yi-lan County, Taiwan, conducting my seminar, Developing the Warrior Within™ - which happens to include The Samurai Game® www.SamuraiGame.org

Seems like I’m always returning from something, doesn’t it? My friend, Lisa, tells me I’m “a travel’n man.” Well, whatever; I guess she’s right. Fact is, the past twelve days have been full, full, full.

Stopping for a few minutes here in Peet’s I’m reflecting on just how prejudiced I can be. You know, the kind of prejudice that means I’ve already made up a story which becomes a reality that doesn’t match what is really the reality.

On my way to Taiwan, March 3^rd, I didn’t know exactly what I was in for. I still didn’t know by the time I had arrived into Taipei on March 4^th. But on the ride across the island and through the tunnel that links Taipei to Yi-lan County I started to get the idea that this trip was going to be beyond my imaginings. I had heard I would meet a zen master … a nun who is known throughout all of Taiwan aka Formosa aka The Republic of China. What’s her name? I still don’t know. Everyone just calls her “Sherfu” (teacher). But soon I came to understand that she was the driving force behind my taking that trip and wanting my work to help influence her students and followers – many of whom study meditation, flower arranging, calligraphy and tea pouring as practices in mindfulness.

I was somewhat aghast at the prospect. What could I possibly bring to them, given the sincerity of their already established practices? And, with respect to the three other nuns who make up the core group at their temple, how would they receive such a thing as “developing the warrior within” given their peacefulness? When finally I met Sherfu I told her my concern and asked her point blank. She smiled … a wholly (and holy) delightful smile … and replied, “Oh this and you are just what I want. We need to study leadership and decisiveness and taking a stand and how to fend for ourselves.” As another person, Kay (translator and main link person) put it, “Sherfu wants to toughen everyone up around here. They need to not be so reliant on her. Gotta make ‘em stronger!”

Well, well, well. We had a terrific time together we had. And warriors they were – especially the four nuns - were they ever!!! Surely put a psychological poke in my eye that reminded me to not be so short-sighted in my thinking (what can I possibly bring to them, remember?)

A few years ago I stood at and walked on the Great Wall of China. Last week I stood before four nuns and students on Formosa Island. Which do you think was bigger? The answer is clear to me. Never underestimate a Sherfu.

Questions for Thought

Last fall Dr. Kathleen Kane, Professor of Leadership & Organizational Behavior at the University of San Francisco’s School of Business & Management, advised that she had heard great things about the film Man On Wire – a 2008 Magnolia Film production. In December, I purchased the film and viewed it in preparation for the Winter 2009 Leaders’ Retreat. It was/is magnificent!

Beyond a subtle undercurrent psychological study of Phillipe Petit, the French hire-wire walker who in 1974 strode for forty-five minutes between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, this is a powerful true story of what a few people can do when they set their minds to something.

We used the film at the Retreat. In my preparation prior to the Retreat I sat in my office viewing and was struck with a question coming up from within me, followed by another – and then another. I had to hit the pause button, because the flow of questions would not stop, and get paper and pencil to write down what was being generated. We used these questions at the Retreat. Then last week I used the same list of questions (sans film) for the Samurai Game® delivery I did for the Institute of Embodied Wisdom in Westlake Village, California. The people were left speechless.

A few years ago in conversation with George Leonard he remarked that he had seen and was recommending Touching The Void, adding, “It’s the most powerful film of the human spirit I have ever seen.” I saw that film and afterward had to agree with George’s viewpoint. It is above, if not on par with, The Endurance.

Now, add to that short list, Man On Wire. Get it. View it. View it again.
Here is the list of late night questions that erupted from within:
What do you dream about in life?
What do you risk?
What are you willing to risk
How alive to do you allow yourself to be?
How do you express your aliveness?
What stories do you carry with you about failing?
Who counts with you on things that matter?
Who counts with you on things trivial?
Who do you forgive?
Who do you allow yourself to be forgiven by?
What sounds do you attend to?
What have you noticed about your spirit when the odds are against you?
Who inspires you?
Who do you inspire?
Who do you trust?
Who do you allow to trust you?
What stories do you carry with you about money?
Under what circumstances are you aware of your sense of smell?
How capable are you when you find yourself in the midst of exhaustion?
What can you do with a committed team?
What if the team is just you and one other person?
What if you’re all alone?
What is your daily work of art?
What do you practice?
What colors seek your attention?
How invested are you in planning?
How are you when it comes to spontaneity?
Under what circumstances do you exercise patience?
Under what circumstances do you underestimate yourself?
Under what circumstances do you overestimate yourself?
How do you language this in your unspoken words?
What are your capacities?

©Lance Giroux, 2009

An Interview With George Hersh

George Hersh, a native of Topeka, Kansas, owns and is CEO of the GMJ Co., Inc., which is comprised of the Sports Associated Companies (MO, NJ and CA), Topeka Transfer & Storage, Capital City Distribution and O'Neil Relocation which is headquartered in Southern California. Additionally, he owns, manages or holds officer positions in a number of other companies in the mid-west, doing business in the savings and loan, construction, commercial real estate and records management industries. He began his career developing and leading companies in 1981 with the founding of Kelly Port Arcade, which he owned and operated for four years. He is married, has three children and currently lives in Topeka.

George was the driving force behind the creation of the Allied Ronin Leaders' Retreat, and has attended every retreat except two since their inception in 2004, with the most recent one being last week, January 24-28. He is very passionate about issues involving children with disabilities. At the most recent Retreat he agreed to be interviewed for the Allied Ronin e-newsletter.

Allied Ronin: You are a very successful person, but it wasn't always that way. What was it like for you as a young man going to college and going into business?

George: It was very confusing. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what it was. I had great difficulty reading, spelling and writing. I could see words but didn't understand the flow. Comprehension was hard. As a kid I was hyperactive, felt less than and acted out a lot. Honestly, I felt abandoned. No matter how I tried to express myself to my parents, I couldn't articulate what was going on for me, and they didn't understand. These days more kids can be accurately diagnosed learning disabilities, but in the 60's and 70's very few people recognized the signs.

Allied Ronin: How did you cope with this?

George: I learned to protect myself from thinking I was a failure. I wouldn't ask for help, because I didn't want to seen as less than by other people. I found I could do well in areas other than academics, but at the same time I didn't want people to know that I wasn't like the other kids. I had to be ten steps ahead of anyone finding out that I wasn't all that good. Looking back, it served me in many ways because I've trained myself to always be looking ahead for options and opportunities, seeing connections in business that other people don't see and turning problems into solutions.

Allied Ronin: I agree. You are one of the best multi-taskers I know.

Geroge: You're right, I can work on a lot of different things, juggling many balls, and with a lot of energy every day. The worry, though, when I was young, was that someone would find out that I was having difficulty. But the fact is I struggled through three years of college before anyone knew what was going on for me. The feeling inside me was intense frustration. I did a lot of blaming and felt alone.

Allied Ronin. Well, you've taken big steps to correct this. What did you do?

George. Fortunately, in my 30's I found an organization, Learning Techniques www.learningtechniques.com which was able to help. First, they showed me that the issue was the neural connections that help a person learn how to learn didn't form when I was a young person. Your work here at this Retreat, and in the other things you do for people, is about increasing one's awareness of and then actively practicing with the abilities of the right and left brain hemispheres. Learning Techniques opened me to that notion. Then they open me to the fact that the human brain can grow in its capacity to connect and learn throughout one's entire lifetime. They had me doing a lot of patterning work; and as silly as some may think it sounds, it really works. By patterning I mean I spent hours and hours synchronizing my hand and foot movements to speech and eye movements. Here at the Leaders' Retreat you have Madeline Wade and Susan Hammond working with people on that basic idea for increased personal and professional effectiveness. At Learning Techniques I specifically focused on learning to learn. Their program would be more powerful if they expanded on the idea of what's going on for the person who is struggling; in other words, the psychological aspect. I still struggle at times, but things are much better and I love learning. Another thing that worked for me is that I took their program with my brother. Having a partner and family support really matters. He had similar issues. It helped us both, and we're closer because of this.

Allied Ronin. Let's talk about business. We met over fifteen years ago. One of the things I've noticed is that you have great employee retention. How do you account for this?

George. I want people to enjoy what they do. I want them to make money, and they know it. I want their families to prosper. I want them to take care of the customer and be creative about that. The GMJ Companies are all service organizations. So, for example, when a driver from Topeka Transfer and Storage, which is our United Van Lines operation, or from Capital City Distribution, which is our Mayflower operation, is working a job, he or she knows that what is being wrapped, packed and moved involves someone's sentiments. What the average person may see as a cup and saucer, we see as someone's treasured memory. We really do. I guess I'm just sensitive to people's feelings - and maybe it's because of what I went through as a kid. And while both of those two companies are located in Kansas, they have trucks on the road, serving customers coast-to-coast all the time. Those two companies are examples of the way I've always felt about being in business, which is, I often feel that owning a company is small when compared to being a steward of that company. I didn't create Topeka Transfer and Storage (TTS), I bought it. It's a company with a great history and reputation that's over a hundred and forty-five years old, long before I came on the scene. I feel it's my honor to keep that history, reputation and tradition growing. The people who work for TTS generally feel the same way. They are home, and they are headquartered in my parent's hometown. The simple one-person-things really do matter. The same feeling holds true for the people who work for Sport Associated and O'Neil Relocation.

Allied Ronin. Well, tell us a bit about Sports Associated and O'Neil Relocation, the company that's most recently come under the umbrella of GMJ.

George. Both are great companies. I have to say that first of all. When I compare their capacity for service and the creativity of the people who work there, from executives and senior managers to the guy or gal on the loading dock or working a trade show I have to say they are head and shoulders above the rest of the industry.

Sports Associated is known for superior service in the transportation, warehousing and exposition of motorcycles, specialty vehicles, watercraft and other specialty items. The company was started decades ago by two guys with a flatbed truck and a trailer. Today it's history includes a great reputation serving some of the most well-known names in the world, including Yamaha, BMW and Ducati. Whereas many companies support the same expos that we do (Datona Bike Week, Sturgis, Leguna Seca, the International Motorcycle Show, etc.), SAI is known for going far beyond what the others do. Our people do everything except make and man the display. Our operations manager, Roger, is one of the most creative people I have ever met. When a project comes our way his general comment is, "Don't worry, we can get it done." And the fact is - he's right, we do. In other words, we customize our trucks to move the items - hauling more per truck than our competitors. We set up the displays, we remain on site throughout the shows to assist with display management, we tear down the displays, we move and warehouse the displays and the vehicles or items. Because we do this, we have an experience edge that can't be beat. SAI is a world-class operation that, in my opinion, has no equal. No one, and I really mean this, does it better than SAI. I've traveled the circuit, and laid tape myself with the drivers. This company makes me proud. We have customized trailers that are complete high-tech office and display facilities able to provide and serve state-of-art off-site press introductions. One of our most unique clients is Eagle Rider, who we serve nation-wide moving their motorcycles so they can more easily serve their clients.

SAI can adapt to and serve any kind of trade show, anywhere in the US. What I'm also proud of, and I wish more people knew about this, is that SAI can easily and equally serve specialty needs. Imagine an organization, whether company or non-profit or extended family wanting to provide a special event for it's personnel at unique location, say, the Kentucky Derby or the Super Bowl or a World Series Game or the Presidential Inauguration, or just someplace special that an organization or family selected for whatever reason most important to them. Because of our connections (tenting, local contracts, unions, etc.) we can produce a set-up at remote locations that would dazzle anyone. The SAI people are inventive and love what they do. Sorry, once I get started talking about SAI it's hard for me to stop.

You asked about O'Neil Relocation. This is a big operation, and again with a wonderful history which began in 1947. It is the newest company to come under the GMJ umbrella. I have been most fortunate to acquire it and the team of people who make it tick, led by Dennis Allsop who started with the company as a salesman and is now the company's president. O'Neil Relocation is a United Van Lines operation and has significant warehousing facilities in the Los Angeles, San Francisco and Dallas areas. Our trucks and warehouses serve corporations, government agencies, the military and individuals needing household relocation. We specialize in pad wrapped, lift gate, air ride, containerized equipment. Beyond that, O'Neil moves special products: telecom equipment, school fixtures equipment, and equipment for high-end hotels.

I should mention that when GMJ acquired O'Neil we also acquired Corporate Relocation Service, which is a Mayflower Van Lines operation, and also led by Dennis Allsop.

Allied Ronin. What matters to you?

George. I'd have to say first, it's my family - and this starts with my wife and children, and then my mom and dad, who are both still alive. I've been married twenty-five years. Marcia and I have three great kids, all now in college. My dad is in his 90's and my mom's in her 80's, and they're both still kick'n. I hope I have the energy, insight and wisdom they have when I get to be their age. Then it goes to the people who work with me in the companies. I'm a down to earth guy, nothing slick and flashy, and I really relate to the average person, the drivers and accountants and receptionists who I get to live my life with. My truck, more often than not, is my office. I don't need much. I love people.

Another thing is what I worry about. Now and then I worry that things are too easy for my children. Their perspective of me is that I'm someone who is mostly connecting with people by phone and making things happen between people. And, unfortunately, they think it's easy. I don't know how many times I've heard them say, "Dad, all you do is drive around and talk on the phone." They don't grasp the enormity of the risks I've taken and how much patience that takes, and a willingness to listen to what other people need and have to say.

Also, a person's dream is important, and it's important that people get a chance to live their dreams. My dad and mom's business was savings and loan. Being the renegade that I was, I wanted to go off and do my own thing. Kelly Port Arcade was my start back in 1981. I took an idea and made it happen, and if I hadn't done that, maybe I'd be in the S&L business - I don't know. But, I also have to say that taking care of my mom and dad and their interests is important. Especially these days I've always made that a priority and it's given me satisfaction that I've been able to take care of my parents.

Then, and this goes back to what we were talking about at the start of this interview, it's the future of our communities and our nation - really our world. And that future is up to our kids. No big news here. But, a significant percentage of kids have learning disabilities. Because I had difficulty for such a long time, I have grown up with feelings of inadequacy. Now, I know that's not the truth, but for a long time I sure felt that way. One of my dreams is to create a foundation for kids with learning disabilities because I can relate to them. People learn in different ways. There's no such thing as a one-size-fit's-all kid, just like there's no such thing as a one-size-fit's-all customer moving from one town to another. You showed us a video at the last retreat of Sir Ken Robinson's presentation at TED, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?"

Robinson talked about the need to re-think and re-tool how we educate our children. Some kids learn and process information more through moving their bodies than they do through sitting in classrooms or reading books. Some kids are natural born artists. We need to look beyond reading, writing and arithmetic. We cannot afford to let the genius of our future to slip through cracks simply because it doesn't conform to what we think education is. That is a powerful statement of something that we, you and I, share in common; a desire to expand the creative capacity of people - no matter who they are or where they come from.

Allied Ronin. Thanks very much George.

George. Hey, you're welcome. I hope this makes a difference for someone. Truth is, if I can do what I've been able to do - so can anybody else if they put their mind to it.

(Mr. George Hersh can be reached at 816-483-8900 or email ghersh1@mac.com)

A Lesson In Action

Remember last month's newsletter? The topic was breathing as a practice in the face of fear.

The lesson was punctuated on Tuesday, December 23rd. A score of us attended an aikido class at Two Rock Aikido. Richard Strozzi-Heckler, our sensei, moved us into an exercise for which he is uniquely known: walking, turning, standing. A kind of organized chaos. Random and rapid, yet relaxed. The idea: in a confined and silent room, each of us moves and allows the space between us to appear and disappear revealing opportunity for best action. To be in this swirl you are encouraged to forego a plan, other than to allow a sort of gravity (created by the empty space and those around you) to pull you from one direction to another. Its value, either as a martial arts exercise or life metaphor, may be hard to imagine until practiced. Kind of like ice cream - explain all you want; but it's only through taking a bite that one really understands and enjoys. Such is the way with any commitment. A few minutes into the exercise Richard's voice cut the silence, "Pay attention to your breath! It's the platform of our art."

This month's topic for consideration, again for effective action during times of stress, tension and fear, is humor and laughter.

Google search laughter and you'll find a flood of online articles advising its mind-freeing benefit and remedies for creativity. A belly laugh every twenty-four hours is apparently good heart medicine - emotionally and physically.

Author Laurence Gonzales offers his perspective:

· "Every pursuit has its own subculture, from hang gliders and step creek boaters to cavers and mountain bikers. I love their dark and private humor, those ritual moments of homage to the organism, which return us to a protective state of cool. It unequivocally separates the living from the dead."

· "The fact is you have to deal with these things [fear and terror] to the best of your ability. If you don't work with it, it'll get to you."

· "It sounds cruel, but survivors laugh and play, and even in the most horrible situations -- perhaps especially in those situations -- they continue to laugh and play. To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such --- (P)lay puts a person in touch with his environment while laughter makes the feeling of being threatened manageable."

· "Moods are contagious, and the emotional states involved with smiling, humor, and laughter are among the most contagious of all. It's automatic, and one person laughing or smiling induces the same reaction in others. --- There is evidence that laughter can send chemical signals to actively inhibit the firing of nerves in the amygdala, thereby dampening fear."

· "It is not a lack of fear that separates elite performers from the rest of us. They're afraid, too, but they're not overwhelmed by it. They manage fear."
(p 40-41, Deep Survival, 2004, W.W. Norton publisher)

As for me, I recall a cold January afternoon twelve years ago. Laying seriously injured on Capitola Beach, California, I was alone. My fall from a boulder had completely split my left femur. My friend ran for help and returned an hour later with a bevy of paramedics and police officers. "Are you the victim?" they asked, " We're looking for a dead body." "Yes and no," I confessed. "Yes, I'm the (ugh) victim, and NO, I'm not dead." Into a metal basket I went. The pain - horrendous. Our trek, the rescuers figured, needed to be straight out into the ocean, avoid the big rocks, then circle back onto sand once near the ambulance. The tide was incoming. It was going to be a rough trip and we all knew it. Every step's jarring motion produced in me a scream. So I asked the medics, now up to their glutes in salt water, "You guys mind if I do something strange?" "Nah, go ahead," they agreed; and I began humming loudly - more like groaming (think hybrid hum and groan). The tune, "Think of Me" from Phantom of the Opera. The medics started to grin and laugh. Through half a mile of surf my groaming continued, mixed with intermittent screams. At times, I was smiling too. What a relieving way to overcome the pain (mine) and the work (theirs). It also kept me conscious. It remains for me an unforgettable journey. And for them, perhaps the strangest, funniest and most relaxed rescue ever.

Returning to Tuesday, December 23rd - a few days ago. Something happened that night that was unexpectedly funny (maybe that's what makes humor so powerful -it evokes spontaneity). Richard was in the midst of testing one of the students. The atmosphere was formal and serious, with high expectation for excellence in a display of deliberate attacks and blends. There was tension in the air. "Show me variations from yokomen uchi," Richard ordered. And he continued, "Now, show me variations from morote dori". And on it went becoming faster and more intense - "from katadori" - "from ushiro waza". Then suddenly, making no sense at all, his voice cracked the tension across the room, "Now show me - sand the floor." For an instant none of us believed what we had heard. I started laughing. The laughter became infectious. A warm wave of relief swept the dojo and the person being tested proceeded with ease, grace and dignity, and filled with breath. The rest of us watching, thoroughly enjoyed the art he displayed.

If you have never seen the film, The Karate Kid the "show me sand the floor" is as meaningless as un-savored ice cream. If you have seen that movie - maybe you're smiling too.

Consider this: laughter increases one's capacity for breath.

In The Face of Fear- Take A Deep Breath

Last month it was Truman’s; “The only thing new in the world is the history we don’t know.” This month the quote is from his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The quote is quite relevant given our national and international situation. And it’s concerning on another level. If Jay Leno, of Tonight Show fame, were to do his question-on-the-street sketch, poking microphones into faces and asking about history, many people would be stumped regarding who Truman and Roosevelt were. To stretch the sad humor of this and imagine Jay prodding his innocents with, “Well, let me help you. Roosevelt died on the job and Truman took over. Tell me, for a free foot-long hotdog, who was the vice president where Roosevelt worked?” The odds are we’d see a few people stumble, mumble and finally utter something like, “What company did Roosevelt work for?” OR if they knew Roosevelt’s final job we may hear, “Ahhhh, ummm, Richard Nixon?” Score “one” for Mr. Leno. Score “minus three” for FDR, Harry and the rest of us.

No doubt we are living in fearful and chaotic times that in many ways defy common sense. When last month’s newsletter was a work in progress a gallon of regular across the street cost over four dollars. Today, the same sign advertises it at $1.89. During this same period, the stock market has gone to hell, to the moon, back to hell, and now rests somewhere just above or below sea level depending on where you’re standing. Everybody’s cousin is appearing before the U.S. Congress asking for a bailout. Who will be next? Big oil? Obama and McCain were campaigning like crazy. That election is now history. Obama his more work cut out for him than anyone imagined (or admitted to) six months ago. Mumbai, economic center to one sixth of the world’s population, has just been shaken along by radicals who’s numbers probably couldn’t fill a section of Jay Leon’s Tonight Show theater or full staff the restaurant across the street from the station selling buck-eighty-nine gas.

When it comes to remaining effective during times of change, fear, pressure, chaos and crisis, where is the practical training? Practices were and are available through school: problem solving, test taking, theme writing, working to make the team, trying out for the band or the play. These practices are still available, though in some ways are increasingly weakened. Internet term papers are for sale. Calculators are smart enough to do the step-by-step thinking that used to strengthen a student’s mind. Steroids or other more easily hidden instant enhancers jolt athletic advancement. How’d those kids get so big anyway? Has our public has forgotten the inherent educational value (both right brain and left brain) of music and theater in school; as well as the inherent educational value of work for the sake of itself?

Does the end really the means? What is the end, anyway? Perhaps the means is its only justification.

In many ways we’ve become effective users of systems that problem solve for us. Question: What happens to one’s effectiveness when systems fail? When the car’s satellite navigation system and your mobile phone or OnStar simultaneously quit, and you’re disoriented without a paper map nearby, what to do? Or worse, an old map is available, but time was never taken to learn to read or use one? Or you learned to read a road map, but the map in the car is a topographical map. Worse yet, you’re in an accident in a desert or forest (even if that’s metaphorical) and there’s no one around with personal knowledge of such a situation to ask for help.

The time for learning effectiveness is best approached long before a need for that effectiveness arrives on the scene. But that luxury (a time for learning) is never lost, though it can be forgotten. Fact is, learning and practicing a skill, including being effective under pressure, can start anytime regardless of age or life situation.

In times of fear – times of chaos, change and crisis – a fundamental need is to have an increasing capacity to remain relaxed and calm under pressure. Why? First, because, the capacity to relax under pressure is a critical and primary component of problem solving, creativity, clear thinking, right and left brain communication, and sustained physical and emotional action. A capacity to relax under pressure allows the brain to function at its best. It allows the body to act at peak performance. Second, the ability to relax under pressure is a (if not the) key component to attracting and unifying others who also subject to the effects of chaos, change, crisis and fear.

Sure, we can muscle, macho and scream at five-day stretches and then numb out on a weekend. We can toke, smoke and tequila through pressure and take our aspirin, Aleve or Excedrin in the morning. We can bark at others in an effort to manage and boss through bad times. But bossing and managing, while related to leadership, are not what real leadership is about. We can fire or ignore people to get to an bottom line acceptable to temporary situations. But try to find those people later when times are calm – and try to keep fear from spreading through the organization (or country) when the layoffs and unemployment come. Channel surfing, Facebook-ing and Twitter-ing have their place. But when they become distractions to effective action, what’s the price?

As of this writing I have been attending a school for almost nine years. When I started, I would go once a week. After a year I stretched it into a perceived maximum of two nights a week. When I started, some of my closest friends and some family members thought this was odd undertaking and a luxury, given my responsibilities and the level of education I already had. The school had no intellectual components, outside of learning to translate some English words into their Japanese components and then into a universal language of embodied action. In some ways I used to think of it that way too, a luxury. I wanted my process and progress to go fast. What I found was the faster I effort-ed, the slower my progress became.

After three years my perspective began to shift. My attendance was drifting away from a luxury; it was becoming important. From this change of perspective I somehow found time to attend classes on a three and then four-day-a-week schedule. My level of effective and efficient professional work increased, as did my international business and travel. Simultaneously, my creative abilities (music, writing and art) began to soar. Social involvement and interaction with people also expanded. My friendships grew, accompanied by more time to spend with others. I found ways to attend related classes in the cities, towns and countries where my business took and takes me. Regardless of differences in teaching styles and competency levels, ALL of the teachers in these other places addressed the same basic message of the teacher at the school where I started and where I still live.

The message? Learn to become increasingly effective under pressure. Don’t learn about it. Learn it. How? Presence yourself. When you enter into pressure situations breath deeply in a measured rhythm, slow down, connect with your environment and others - including those you feel pressured by. Turn often and look from the perspective of the pressure and adversaries as they move and especially as they come toward you. Continue to breath deeply. Hold a relaxing image – a quality of peace and strength – in your mind. Don’t quit. Continue to pay attention. Continue to breath deeply in a rhythm.

Continuing. Learn to become increasingly effective in situations not involving pressure. Don’t learn about it. Learn it. Be Here Now. How? When you enter into these situations breath deeply, slow down, connect with others and the environment around you. Turn often and look from the calm perspective of the people and the environment within which you find yourself. Continue to breath deeply. Keep this quality of peace and strength in your mind for the future. Create a mental image of it that you can recall with all your senses. Don’t quit. Continue to pay attention to your breathing. Reflect on this when you prepare to enter into or are in situations of pressure.

The above may sound a bit esoteric. Overwhelming practical value it does have, of that is rarely understood until its practice is given honest effort.

Over thirty years ago I met a man who for a time became my mentor. In many ways he was very exceptional and successful at his skill and his business – a skill and business that demanded very little physical effort other than long hours of standing. He passed away eight years after we met. Throughout those eight years he often said to those who worked with him, “Some of you are going to want to invalidate the lessons we are studying because they don’t fit your background or because you think you’re smarter than this or because you are looking for instant gratification.” Then he would add, “Here’s a challenge. Take just one of these lessons and practice it with a sincere desire to DISPROVE it. I’ll guarantee you, you won’t. But go ahead and try anyway. Why? Because, if you honestly try to disprove a lesson through its practice you’re going to be practicing the process which makes it work. These lessons and principles have been around for thousands of years; they have withstood the acid test of time. The only thing that hasn’t been proven is – you, and your willingness to stick with it.”

The first lesson in all of his encounters? How to relax under pressure.

The way all his lessons and exercises began? “Pay attention. Take a deep breath.”

Another Day. Another Leader.

November 1, 2008, sitting at Pete’s Coffee on South Petaluma Boulevard, in Petaluma, California. Three days to go in a contest, a process, that started two years ago, and arguably for some long before that. And it will continue past Tuesday. You can bet on it. The headlines of our local newspaper, The Argus Courier, read “Record number of Petaluma voters” – and indicates that more than 90% of those registered may cast ballots. That’s good news.

The plea for leadership is strong and loud. Yet, unfortunately it’s also numbing. That’s sad news. I wish that weren’t so – the numbing part. But it is, as evidenced by a medium complaining how long this process has been underway, and how wonderful it will be when it’s over. How come that’s sad? Because we cry out for leadership when our times are bemoaned, or when we feel victimized by the economy or stressed because of a war or the downslide of the stock market or global warming or based on whatever situation we’re in. But when things are cushy and pleasant and easy and there’s no perceived threat, either internally or externally, leadership as a topic is at best either something reserved for an MBA semester elective; or a slogan in some mission statement that isn’t really a mission statement but actually an advertisement some focus group spent a couple of hours playing with (man am I tired of slogans). At worst leadership as a study in practice is something left as a discretionary spending budget line item when our organizations can afford a management retreat which really isn’t a retreat nor does it have much at all to do with leadership but rather is a sit-around-the-bar-session-knocking-back-cocktails-and-beer-while-discussing-blends-grapes-the-pour-and-nuances-of-the-day’s-last-putt. Have another cigar? Think I will, thank you very much.

Truman as quoted by Miller was often short and to the point, e.g. “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” (p. 69, Plain Speaking). He understood the need for average persons to wake up to how much they matter in life. I imagine this was so for him because he understood that he was an average man. FYI, 1973 a lowly second lieutenant in the Army, married with dependents (me at that time) was making about $550 per month. A four star general with 30 years of service, married with dependents was making about $2800 per month. Kind of makes one think, especially in light of the roller coaster of the past months. And all of us, 2nd Lt’s and Generals alike, sat in hour-long lines waiting to fill our cars with gas.

So at this moment and for this month’s newsletter and blog, I think I’ll rant a bit.

First. Leadership isn’t academic, though it definitely should be a topic in every school from grade one through all doctoral levels. It should be included in dialogue in all extracurricular activities such as music, sports, art, home economics, etc. Why? Because those activities really aren’t extracurricular. They are educating half of the brain, the right half, the activities that enhance full mental capacity and they are just as important as the left-brain activities commonly referred to as curricular, i.e. reading, writing and arithmetic. Someone, somewhere should be asking the following questions in our schools all the time: who and what is influencing you; who and what are you influencing; how is what we have been doing and studying going to be of influence in life when you step outside this room or off this playing field? We don’t need to tell our kids the answers to these questions, because the answers will change.

Second. Leadership isn’t about having the right slogan. It’s about everyday reality. It’s not reserved for some time when some person or some team occupies some office or position or has some kind of title affixed to some name or has amassed some certain level of fortune and is then entitled to be called Leader. Leadership is as present and as simple as the average person making coffee, taking time for shampoo, washing hands or the dog or the car, raking leaves, saying something simple to your son or daughter, putting gas in the truck or changing the oil. [Maybe changing oil should be left off the list because some folks have forgotten that lubricants, like old ideas, need changing; and yet lubricants, like old ideas, are universally necessary!]

Third. Leadership should never, ever, ever be attended to only when we have set aside enough discretionary funds to attend a retreat. In fact attending a retreat should not be hinged to discretionary funds. Refreshing the mind (i.e. going on retreat) ought be thought of as something necessary for good mental, emotional and spiritual regularity. We don’t consider the respective parentheses associated with refreshing physical regularity (i.e. meal time and toilet time) as things reserved for when our pockets are flush with cash. We get it about that – bodily inflow and outflow are essential to physical health. But when it comes to the digestive processes of the mind, the heart and the soul – ahhhh, some-a-day when there’s enough money and time, maybe we’ll attend to the inflow and outflow of that. In case you haven’t noticed, our yesterdays are quickly becoming the some-a-days that we should have been attending to. [I said this was going to be a rant]

Fourth. Let’s be straight. You and I are being influenced all the time by someone or something. Additionally, we’re influencing someone else and/or some situation all the time. Influence surrounds and binds us and it flows through us. Influence is the essence of what it means to lead. I realize this may sound rather Yoda-ish. Alas, some have either forgotten the lessons of Star Wars Episode IV or they have never seen the movie.

We grow blind the fact that, regardless of station or age or title or whatever else we want to call it, we are always leading and being led all of the time. We get so used to the influences that press on us daily (or the influence that we have on others) that we numb out to them. It doesn’t mean that they (we) are no longer of influence. It merely means that we are no longer conscious of this influence at work.

Some influences that touch us (or that we are) are attractive: beautiful music, vivid colors, sweet odors and tones and textures, supportive voices and the like. Some are repulsive: yellow tarps over spread next to overturned smoldering cars; hateful graffiti splashed across walls or doors; anguished faces viewing the remains of cherished children or parents suddenly gone; the homeless one passed out late at night inside a post office; spittle on the sidewalk; the roll of untrusting eyes or the sneer of disgusted lips; sharp unforgiving comments; raw vulgarities of racial, ethnic or sexist slurs; the dull dazed look of a drugged kid sitting on a curb. Either way, pleasant or ugly, we don’t notice or we pretend we don’t notice or we walk quickly on by or we soon forget. We become, as Marshall McLuhan put forth in a 1969 Playboy magazine interview, so used to the environment we’re living in that we no longer see, feel or hear it talking to us or about us or from us. (“I don’t know who first discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t the fish,” McLuhan.)

Today is November 1st. By the time these words are delivered and posted in e-newsletter form or at www.AlliedRonin.blogspot.com either a McCain or an Obama will be the President-elect of the United States. As I write these words that outcome is a mystery. By the time these words get posted and delivered online that outcome will be history. Both Obama and McCain are leaders. So are you.

US citizens are involved in a grand experiment, an experiment rooted 2,500 years ago in the ground of ancient Athens. An experiment that Abe Lincoln wrote of as being “of the people, by the people and for the people.” We are not separate from government, no more than we are separate from nature. True, we can think of ourselves as separate. But thinking that we are separate does not change the fact that we are connected, no more than thinking the world is flat changes the fact that it is round. We are the government. Some may reply, “How naïve!” OK, but where does that kind of cynicism lead? There are people alive today by trainloads wishing they could get here or wanting their own land to change so that could enjoy the freedom to actually exercise this kind of naivety at home. Last month’s newsletter addressed some lessons learned by viewing the US from outside our borders. Add to that this thought: the things you and I do here over the next few days either through action or inaction may be small, but in time they make a difference. On Election Day or on any other day millions, actually billions, of human beings living elsewhere see the truth of this and wonder why we have such difficulty seeing it for ourselves.

When you read this whether you voted or didn’t vote in the election of November 4, 2008 – you voted. And your vote was counted. You contributed somehow to the outcome.

Bringing it back to everyday stuff of the average person. Like the man sitting on the bale of hay and the boy in his arms in the photo above - we’re all influencing and being influenced all the time by someone or something. What influence does the boy have on his father? What influence does the father have on the boy? You can’t see either of their eyes. Yet it’s clear that on that day they were each looking in different directions, existing simultaneously in the same place yet holding vastly different perspectives. You may not be the boss. You may not be the manager. You may not be the person in charge. You may not be the employee. You may not be office temp. You may not be the father or the mother. You may not be the son or the daughter. You may be big. You may be small. But somehow right now you are a leader. You’re affecting an outcome.

Who and what are you influencing? Who or what is influencing you? Stay alert!

Juxtapositions.

November 5, 2008 at Majestic Hotel, Guangzhou, China. Travel here, long. A thirty-hour day.

Sitting in economy class window seat not my ideal way spending hours and hours inside one plane, San Francisco to Tokyo. But tracking gps progress and noticing when we were above Aleutian Islands led to a magnificent view that otherwise wouldn’t have been afforded. Mountains. Snow. Volcanic craters. Glaciers. Ocean. Blue sky. Clouds. Un-real!

Flight from Tokyo to Guangzhou on Northwest Airlines, US owned and staffed. Safety announcements done in English. Flight departs from Japan and lands in China. Hmmmm. Go figure.

Guangzhou and I was one of first off the plane. But was almost last of a plane load going through PRC immigration. Why? The inspecting officer needing no glasses to see, sat very still studying and contemplating my passport. My passport, like me, has successfully passed PRC scrutiny many, many times the past four years. Not certain she, the immigration officer, was seeing what she wanted, she, who didn’t wear glasses, had me remove mine (glasses always worn and pictured on my passport) so she could get a better gander at me. Look hard she did, again and again. I passed her test and walked on. Go figure again.

Midnight checked into the Majestic Hotel. My associates let me know they were hungry, and suggested I eat. OK. They thought perhaps best if we could go to a nice restaurant, after all I’m guest in their country. I suggested we dine at all-night-eat-where-only-locals-do-at-a-small-one-room mom and pop shop that we walked past down an adjacent alley. Perfect. Our over bowls of pork soup, dumplings, won ton soup conversation? McDonnald’s in America vs. China.

Go figure some more.

Getting Beyond Prejudice Today

It’s been a busy time at Allied Ronin the past month as the maples and elms make their annual change of color turning hillsides across Sonoma County amber, orange, yellow and an occasional red. As I write these words I feel rather Garrison Keillor-ish (www.prairiehome.publicradio.org). Part of me that lives within a fantasy, a nostalgic journey that starts with the words, “It’s been an interesting time in my hometown.” But unlike Keillor my last month and a half has been everywhere but at home while fall colors emerge across county landscapes.

Aug 31 to Sept 3 involved travel to Mexico City with an overland trip west into the mountains near Valle de Bravo for leadership training and Samurai Game® www.SamuraiGame.org delivery to the CEO and senior execs of Walt Disney Mexico. Sept 5-7 was an aikido seminar at Incline Village, Nevada (Lake Tahoe) hosted by Truckee Aikido and conducted by Richard Strozzi-Heckler (www.TwoRockAikido.com) and Linda Holiday www.northbayaikido.org. Sept 11 - 19 were two leadership trainings in China: the first, a public offering in Yongkang (small town”of 300,000); and the second, a corporate program for the owner and the eighty senior managers of QSRY Manufacturing Company in Hangzhou (small city of 3 million). Both trainings were co-ventured with Vision Consulting (Hangzhou) and involved the Warrior Game™, as the Samurai Game® referred to for political reasons inside China. Brighton, UK, was the next stop (October 1 – 3) for visit with Mark Walsh (www.integrationtraining.blogspot.com) and a meeting he arranged with interested individuals there. Thank you Mark!

The next eight days I ventured east to Krakow, Poland, to work with Pawel Olesiak and Pawel Bernas and conduct a team effectiveness training in Krosno (minutes north of Slovakia and minutes west of the Ukraine) under their umbrella of Aiki-Management. Again involving the Samurai Game®, this time for BN Office Solutions. Attending the Krosno program were the CEO and senior managers of BN’s Krosno operation, plus German and Russian teams. The entire journey closed with a special aikido class I was asked to instruct in Krakow on Oct 8, before dashing across country to Warsaw for a series of flights back to the US.

Over the last forty-five days I’ve met a few hundred interesting folks. No Pastor Inkfist of Lake Wobegon’s Lutheran congregation. No Lefty or Dusty of “The Lives of the Cowboys” fame. And, certainly not one private eye named Guy Noir searching for “the answers to life’s persistent questions.” But interesting people none-the-less and real. I’m amazed at just how similar to us in the US other peoples of the world actually are. Yes, there are differences, but the differences are minor when compared to the overwhelming same-nesses when you get below the surface. An unwillingness to make mistakes causes some people of Hangzhou to get extra quiet. I’ve seen the same thing on college campuses across America. Uncertainty causes some Germans to get strangely boisterous while sitting in a mostly Polish speaking audience. To me, a boisterousness very similar to some experiences I’ve had in the Washington, DC area. High levels of interaction aligned with significant personal discovery makes for soaring spirits in Mexico. Could have been a Las Vegas, Nevada, crowd as far as I’m concerned.

The more I experience the world firsthand the more I wish others could too. Maybe our planet would be a bit more peaceful and trusting and at ease with itself if people around the globe got to know each other face-to-face. This was the underlying theme of my July 1st newsletter and blog (www.AlliedRonin.BlogSpot.com). True, there will always be problems, greed, liars, thieves and some very dangerous people walking in and out of our lives. But in general the majority of people are most likely regular folks trying their best to live, raise families, move forward and get along with others. If we could see past our prejudices and self righteous viewpoints we might be actually be able to see people for who they are – which is pretty good for the most part. At least, that’s the way I see it.

A symbolic example of prejudice (mine) happened in Krakow on October 7th. Driving the three hour drive from Krosno returning to Krakow, Pawel Olesiak asked me if I’d like to visit “a famous salt mine”. Trying to be a good diplomatic American I said, “Yes.” But internally I felt the opposite. I grew up in a mining community. I know mines. I remember tales of the salt mines of Siberia. My imagination carries images of Aleksandr Solshenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and I read his book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” When I was cadet at West Point and later assigned to a regular army outfit as a junior officer, Poland was very much a part of the Soviet regime – a regime that remained entrenched in Eastern Europe until Mikhail Gorbachev proposed “perestroika” and allowed for the emergent voice one Lech Walesna, culminating with a final exit of Soviet forces from Poland in 1993 and ushering the demise of the USSR over the next few years. That was not long ago. These things are very vivid real memories of Pawel’s Olesiak and Bernas, my associates who were born into that system – but who in no way ever want it back.

So on October 8th I went along with Pawel Olesiak’s suggestion and visited the salt mine at Wieliczka (www.krakow-info.com/wielicz.htm). The story and picture of that visit are at my October 1st blog entry. The short version for today’s newsletter posting – I had (based on my imaginings and my personal history , my limited vision and my thinking about what I believed to be true about mines) incorrectly judged what I would find deep under the ground just outside Krakow. What I thought I would find was dull. What I actually found was vivid and beautiful. What I thought I would find was mundane. What I actually found was magnificent. What I originally felt in agreeing to the visist was compliance. What I resultantly felt upon making the visit was gratitude. My visit to the salt mine a few miles outside of Krakow on October 8, 2008, was one of the most incredible things I have witnessed in my life. It is something I’m glad I saw; something I will remember for a lifetime. It’s a good thing my prejudice did not over rule a decision to be a “diplomatic American”- a gracious guest in someone else’s territory. If it (my prejudice) had won, I would have lost.

Here are some questions to ponder this October and going forward into November and on into 2009. Given the news of the day; given the enormous economic, political and ecological crises and choices facing our nation and our world right now – not figuratively, but in reality – what will we do? Not for some future consideration or buck-passing or kicking a can down the street past Pastor Inkfist’s church or Left’s and Dusty’s ranch or along the sidewalk in some dark city that knows how to keep its secrets, but is safe because of an office light that shines on the 12th floor of the Acme Building – an office belonging to some Guy Noir. No. Choices that live in the reality of our time - right now and right here – this day and over the next few weeks. My tutor of many years ago used to say, “If you’re not part of the solution you’re still part of the problem.”

How many of our choices will be made from looking scantly and only at the surface – the way I looked at the salt mines outside of Krakow before taking the time and action to venture down beneath the ground? Will we take the time to look beyond the rhetoric, beyond any misinformation, beyond the surface? Will we dig deeply now when it actually matters? Will we examine the truth and invest for the long haul? These are questions leaders must ask. And because from my perspective we are all leaders (influencing something or someone all the time no matter our age, title, gender, education, etc.) – these are questions that we (you and I) must ask and answer, not once in a while but on a continual basis. In this regard we are all responsible and had best make informed choices. If we err then we need be willing to accept our errors and chose anew. If we do not err then we need to remain vigilant because tomorrow, next month, next year or forty years from now there will be new challenges, new choices, new crises and we’d best practice for that now while we can.

October 9, 2008 - Heathrow Airport - London

It's been a grand time in the UK and Eastern Europe this past week. First - Brighton, England on October 2-3 - very calm fall weather - beautiful city, lots of energy - vibrant people and sights. Like Santa Cruz (the people are) multiplied by factor of 10- far out clothes, shops, coffee houses, etc. I took the "coach" there from Heathrow and visited friend and aikidoka Mark Walsh. We spent hours & hours walking around and linked up with Peter Hamill of Roffey Park Institute and a few other folks for dinner on Friday. One of them being John Whitmore who was introduced through a connection with my friend and associate Lisa Ludwigsen www.SchoolGardenco.com . Actually it's "Sir" John Whitmore ... he's a knight, and author of Coaching for Performance. His book bio acclaims: "Sir John Whitmore began his career as a professional racing driver, driving for the highly successful Ford team at Le Mans and won both the British and European Saloon Car championships in the 1960s."

Friday after dinner was spent two hours of training at the dojo where Mark trains in Brighton. First hour was kashima, which I've seen but not practiced before. Three visiting senseis - all Brits - who study in France under Jaff Raji http://www.aikido-jaffraji.com and were visiting and one of them led the hour kashima before open hand aikido ... my good luck. I'm also wanting to learn the "soft" high fall - and one gave me a few minutes of time after class on that - enough for a sense, but lots of instruction & practice is needed. I'll (hopefully) get a bit more tomorrow night on the "soft" highs here in Krakow - but no guarantee on that and you'll understand as you read on. Falling softly has been something I've wanted to know for over 10 years ... and as it any embodied practice will help me "fall softly" in all areas of life - a talent needed during turbulent times.

Arrived in Krakow Saturday, and Sunday drove to Krosno where led a Samurai Game workshop for BN Office Systems (Monday & today) hosted by Aiki-Management www.Aiki-Management.pl - organized by my associates Pawel (pronounce "pah-vel") Olesiak and Pawel Bernas (who run A-M and are senseis in Krokow). It was three hours of narrow curvy roads through what could have passed for a mix between southern Oregon and the hills/valleys around Gettysburg on first a clear then turned cloudy leaf changing fall day -- very green grasses and pastures, a cow or and crops in many people's yards - owner-built very sturdy homes, but the farther we got towards the Ukraine border the more there were family built wood homes - some log other plank - about 100 to 200 years old still comfortably lived in. It's extremely beautiful country.

On the drive to Krosno we're comparing notes about what they require on shodan exams and what's on ours www.TwoRockAikido.com . When I explained the tanto kata that Richard Strozzi-Heckler teaches - Pawel Olesiak got very curious because he had never heard of it. I explained that it's a "Richard thing" and probably makes sense it's relatively unknown. We're driving these countryside back roads (two cars wide - cars passing and headed straight on to cars coming our way) we're talking and moving thru it. At breakfast on Monday he says, "You have to teach Wednesday's aikido class at our dojo in Krakow so everyone can get whole hour on this kata. You have to do this!" (imagine a forceful Polish accent and you'll get the picture) I start to object, and Olesiak says, "No ... you have to do this." Bernas (pronounced burnah-sh) just sat silently (which is his usual MO) and grinned and shook his head "yes, yes, yes". Thursday morning at breakfast before we completed the program for BN Office Solutions Olesiak says, "We're telling you - word's already on website and email already sent so more students will come tomorrow night's class. So you got to do this thing."

Soooooooo my thoughts were ... "Tomorrow's going to be an interesting day" - visit a famous salt mine outside of Krakow in the morning, teach aikido, rush to train station to catch an all-night train Krakow to Warsaw in time for 6:30 am flight to UK & arrive Gatwick, grab another bus for hour and half ride to Heathrow, fly to LAX, hop a plane to SFO ... and on back home an all day Thursday excursion.

And that's almost what happened ... but things different when then happen than when planned. As a good tourist I agreed to visit the mine but with the prejudiced thought "salt mine?" I was wrong - it was incredible - a must for anyone who visits the Krakow area, the Wieliczk Salt Mine - see www.cracow-life.com/poland/wieliczka-salt-mines and the photo taken hundreds of feet underground of the church carved inside a cavern. Seven hundred years old, and 1000 feet underground now no longer in operation as a mine, but one of UNESCO most favored places of interest in the world. I took lots of pictures of this most historical and interesting place - beyond description. A reminder to me of how easy it is to prejudge things ... and how unaware we are when limited to our own history contained by our borders.

Wednesday night began with an hour of "basics" at the Krakow dojo ... with about 40 others I was a student. Then I immediately led the advanced class with 17ish or so. It went great. The "Pawel's" couldn't have been happier with the knife kata.

Was supposed to transit Krakow to Warsaw by train to catch my plane, but last minute changes were underway because as Olesiak said, "Polish trains - you can't depend on them. If you're even thirty minutes late it'll be bad." So they hired a guy to drive ensuring me timely journey from Krakow to Warsaw.

Timely it was ... more like something from James Bond. Spiriting away from the dojo at 10pm to a dimly lit parking lot across town in Krakow. Jumping from one car to another - handshakes all around with "dobrydania" (good bye). The driver, a guy named Peter (friend of theirs who they described as "professional driver" spoke only Polish) raced me out of the city. What was supposed to be a 5 hour drive was accomplished in 3 and 1/2 hours. Several near misses on the drive with two being extremely wild. It was better than a movie!

Life's never what you expect it to be - and it can be a blast. It's all in the attitude.

It's Never Too Late To Make a Difference - Will You?

In the mid-1980's I had the fortune to meet John Fogg and Eliza Bird, both attorneys, a married couple. Eliza was in private practice. John was working for the California State Insurance Commissioner's office. In 1998 they attended a public seminar offering of mine which included The Samurai Game® (www.SamuraiGame.org) and loved the experience and learning. Shortly thereafter a box appeared on my doorstep. In it a real (not decorative) samurai sword - old, pitted and minus its handle. Beneath where the tsuba (hand guard) would have been was the traditionally steel base etched in kanji with the sword maker's name and a statement attesting, "Completed on a good day 1816". To this day their gift has occupied a place of honor in my home.

John and Eliza retired and ventured off to travel around the world. Now and then email would arrive ...."Fogg/Bird-grams" I call them .... each, like the sword, numbered and dated, bringing tales of high adventure and humor and learning as they cut their way across continents. Midst their journeys they kept residences in northern California and North Carolina.
The summer of 2006 began my two-year transition from brown to black belt rank in aikido, a Japanese martial art www.aikido.com. To symbolically honor the transition I began polishing the blade, but determined to leave pits and blemishes in place. This as a reminder that any journey in life is a process of refinement, sharpening and creating new luster, as well as something which sincerely acknowledges ownership of past blemishes and scars .... things not pretty, yet honestly part of life. By December 2007 the blade, still pitted and scared, was beautiful. The black belt exam was set for five months later and by then I'd be 58.

In the second week of May 2008 a "Fogg/Bird-gram" arrived. Reflecting on their gift I sent John and Eliza an email saying how much the sword meant to me, including the cleaning process and the soul searching my upcoming test had created. The next day a reply arrived from them giving notice they were coming to watch. May 24th was a beautiful day for a test at Two Rock Aikido dojo (www.tworockaikido.com) especially with them present. We didn't have time to talk and agreed to dine a few days later at my home and catch up on years gone by.

A week later. The three of us sat down in my dining room table to enjoy my one-and-only-I-can-cook-this-wait-till-you-taste-it-bacon covered-broiled salmon-asparagus-meal. "Tell us about your kids," they asked. I did. "Tell us about where you've been traveling." I did. "What's become of old so and so?" I answered. "And the old red Ford truck?", they inquired. "It's right outside the front door; you walked by it on the way in", I replied.

Then it was my turn, "What have you been up to?", I asked and that's about as far as I got. They looked at each other. They grinned and laughed .... and for the next two hours out came a story almost unbelievable. I listened to a flow of words and my imagination went wild as though I was watching some kind of Indiana Jones film staring two retired lawyers who had touched and returned to what matters in their life. The theme: it's never too late to take on something important, something big, something .... impossible .... especially if it's of service to others.

But as I strained to listen my brain jolted and grasped pictures and sound bytes. Here's about the way it went:

John: "I had a dream to make a for real difference putting dent in world starvation while I'm still alive. " --- "I remembered I died in that Game we played with you. That was the best part of it because I realized that in reality I was still alive so I could still do something about my dream even if I didn't know exactly what it was I was going to do - so might as well take a step and see what happens."

Eliza (giggling): "Renting, no borrowing, ahhhh ... hmmm, cars ... we'll whatever - we didn't steal 'em .... anyway they're usually mostly old and beat up." --- "We'll truth is we drive what ever it takes." --- "When we are in Africa it's kind of like ....-" "Then there's the times in South America when ...." --- "The maps are often old. Well actually some times there's no maps." -- "Strange directions, too." --- "No air conditioning. No gas. Flat tires. Lost luggage."

John (piping in): "Actually the project is a bit large, but it's just a few old Peace Corps types like me." --- "There's this guy who's invented a peanut sheller. There's another guy ... a college professor ... who improved on the design." --- "Did you know that peanuts are a staple food for much of the planet? People actually live on the peanuts." --- "It's tough work to shell peanuts, cuz they're not like you what get at a baseball game here." --- "Women in the villages are the ones doing the work, the shelling, and if they're lucky it takes them all day to produce only as much food as can sustain their family for one day."

I recalled saying to myself: "Peanut sheller ... what the (bleep) is John talking about? Is he off his meds or what?? Maybe there's something in the salmon they're hallucinating on?"

John (continuing and not really stopping to notice I have an incredulous expression on my face): "Here's what it kind of looks like" (he made a sketch on napkin)" --- "One person can vastly increase their production over what can be done by hand." --- "The machine - concrete and whatever nuts, bolts, pieces of steel you can get for a few dollars at store like Lowe's or Home Depot - and it can be made very quickly."

So many mental scenes later I felt like asking (and maybe I did, I just don't remember the words coming out of my mouth), "Is this for real or are you guys pulling my leg?"

Together they laughed, "This is for real. This is what we've been doing and what we are doing. We actually drive around the world into villages and help people make these things. And it is literally right now helping millions of people worldwide. And we're going to keep at it."

John (adds): "I'm in northern California to visit Silicon Valley. I've been setting up meetings anywhere I can get in a door, and I don't care who I talk to. I don't care if they say "yes" or "no". I go for the top person. I'm going to keep at it, because it's important and it's big. We're actually doing it."
A week later my phone rang. John and Eliza: "We're leaving for Wilmington and we want to have breakfast." I asked - When? They answered - "Tomorrow, because the plane leaves tomorrow night. We're on the run and we're coming for breakfast in the morning!"

Next morning. We walked down Petaluma's Walnut Street and across East Washington Street to Hallie's Diner. Nice place. Good food. We talked more about our prior conversation. They handed me a DVD, hand written on it the words "The Full Belly Project". We finished our breakfast, walked back to my home. They said, "Watch this and you'll understand." We said goodbye. They left. I went inside and put the disc into my DVD player.

Twenty minutes later. I opened AOL and prepared an email to foggbird@yahoo.com - "I want to interview you and Eliza for my newsletter. We have to let people know about this. Will you?"

Next day. John replied, "YES."

The Interview with John Fogg and Eliza Bird

Allied Ronin: Tell us about yourselves. Start with when we first met.
John: We were both attorneys working in San Francisco when we met in 1992. I was working for a consumer protection agency, the California Department of Insurance.

Eliza: I had my own law firm specializing in estates, trusts, wills. We were introduced by a friend who had worked with both of us at different times. We later convinced our friend that now was the time to fulfill a life-long dream and join the Peace Corps. She was in the first group ever to serve Russia. We both stayed at those jobs until we retired in 2001.

Allied Ronin: When were you in the Peace Corps, where were you serving, what did you do and why?

John: I served as a Volunteer in the Amazon side of Bolivia from 1966 to 1968. My job involved village banks. This was an early micro finance project in that the village banks raised their own capital and managed their own affairs without outside help. They had an accounting system that could be kept by someone who couldn't read or write. My job was simply to support their formation and to help with any problems that arose. I was doing this because this was the Viet Nam era and I thought I could better serve my country in the Peace Corps than fighting in a war I didn't believe in.

Allied Ronin: In a nutshell (excuse the pun) what is the Full Belly Project? Tell us part of your actual story.

J&E: Full Belly started with someone by the name of Jock Brandis who observed the need for a simple peanut sheller while in Africa, helping a friend in the Peace Corps there. He promised to send a peanut sheller to them, only to find that there was no such hand operated machine. In fact, it was considered to by the "Holy Grail" of agricultural machines for developing countries as no one had ever been able to make one that actually worked. Not daunted by this, he simply invented one. Realizing that he needed an organization to develop and distribute this sheller, he went to the local association of returned Peace Corps Volunteers. A non-profit corporation called Full Belly Project was formed, and that was the beginning.

My (John) involvement started with my observing that the returned Peace Corps Volunteers were marching in a local parade. I showed up with my Bolivian flag and asked what that "concrete beehive" (the peanut sheller) was. It took off from there. I'm now the Co-President of the Board of Directors which only means I get to do whatever needs to be done and is not done by someone else. For a long time the Board of Directors did all the work of Full Belly just because there was nobody else. When we decided we needed employees, we found we had no means to pay them. Despite this, we had three people who believed so strongly in our mission that they worked full time for free. We have made some progress on the employee front since then, but we still don't pay them nearly what they are worth.

I am (Eliza) on the Advisory Board probably because they thought it might look good to have an attorney on there. That did not stop them from asking if I could drop everything and go to Guatemala with John to help set up a sheller factory there. John still remembers his Spanish from living in South America, and I studied Spanish whenever we traveled to Spanish-speaking countries. We spent almost a month in Guatemala and were gratified to have the factory up and running, as it still in today.

Allied Ronin: Give us a picture as to the size of the problem - world hunger - at least what you are involved with - what are we talking about?
J&E: Peanuts in American are considered a snack that is easily shelled. Neither is true in developing countries. Peanuts are a staple crop, so much so that over half a billion people, that's 500,000,000 people world-wide have peanuts as their primary protein source. Peanuts aren't roasted as in the U.S. Because of a lack of roasting facilities in the developing world, they are sun dried. That makes them tough and leathery. Subsistence farmers, people who can only eat what they can grow, only grow as many peanuts as they can tolerated to shell. With a simple. hand operated peanut sheller people can process peanuts so easily that they can increase the amount planted so they have more than enough to feed their families. The surplus can then be sold, taking a subsistence farmer into a market economy. That's a huge developmental step. Earnings can be used to educate children, including girls, improve living standards and be reinvested.

Allied Ronin: What is the machine you are talking about?
J&E: What originally looked like a "concrete beehive" is a seemingly simple machine made of concrete which is available world wide and metal parts that could be duplicated in any machine shop in the developing world. The concrete is poured into fiberglass molds which we supply and formed into two cones, one of which fits inside the other. The outer cone is fixed while the inner cone rotates, grinding the nut between them. It can be adjust to shell almost any sort of nut or other agricultural product. What would take a person a day to shell goes though this machine in less than an hour. The motive force is a hand crank, no electricity or diesel needed. The tests that the University of Georgia ran for us indicated that the working life of a sheller is about 25 years. Costs vary depending on the country where the sheller are produced, but $45 is the average price that the user pays. The usual situation is that the buyer is a cooperative or less formally, a village or a business man as the average farmer can't afford the $45. Many, many people, maybe a majority of people in the world, live on one dollar a day. $45 is simply out of sight for them as individuals.
We've been referring to the machine as a peanut sheller because it is easiest to explain how it works as that. In reality, it is a universal nut sheller (UNS) that can and does shell coffee, shea nuts (an ingredient in cosmetics), neem nuts (also a cosmetic ingredient, especially in Europe) and many other types of agricultural products. One of the most exciting is jatropha which is a source for bio-diesel. Jatropha grows where nothing else will so it does not compete with food crops, and it helps stabilize the soil. It is thought that it may push back the Sahara which has been expanding for years, while providing a cheap fuel source for vehicles, generators and other machinery.

Allied Ronin: Over dinner you addressed the whole idea of sustainability ... the peanut, what happens to the shells, the growing capacity of the ground and the nutrients, etc. Then there's the economic impact on a small village. Can you talk a bit about these things?

J&E: Our concept of sustainability is tied into our distribution concepts. Through trial and error, we have found that the best way for us to get our shellers into the hands of those who need them is to establish local entrepreneurs who set up a factory as an ordinary profit making business. That system has local business owners employing local labor to make shellers for local consumption. The ordinary market forces sustain the system, and we develop other such factories nearby so that competition keeps prices down.

Sustainability takes other forms when the peanuts, which are a legume, put nitrogen back in the soil that other crops, such as cotton, have taken out. We are working on making the peanut shells into briquettes that prevent deforestation by allowing the shells to be used as cooking fuel instead of cutting down trees. In the Philippines, a local cement manufacturer buys the shellers for the farmers. The farmers pay for the shellers by selling the peanut shells back to the cement factory which burns them to create the cement, thereby getting Kyoto carbon credits.

Allied Ronin: Former US President Jimmy Carter has put his weight behind helping you with this. How did this come about. What is Jimmy Carter adding to your efforts?
J&E: President Carter does not endorse products or projects, but he allowed Full Belly to come to the Carter Center in Plains, GA to demonstrate our sheller and to film that demonstration. He has also kindly allowed us the use that film as we like. In viewing the DVD, it apparent that President Carter who was a peanut farmer before becoming President immediately grasps the concept and the workings of the sheller. President Carter has done extensive work in Africa and appreciates what a simple hand operated machine like this means to the African farmer.

Allied Ronin: What can the average person - the person reading this interview - do that can help make the kind of difference that The Full Belly Project is seeking to make?
J&E: Our main need is money. We are struggling to develop corporate requirements such as audited financial statements so that we can make application to large contributors, but we need to sustain ourselves in the meantime. If we could have a substantial number of ordinary people who would be willing to donate what it costs a farmer in the developing world to buy a sheller, namely $45, that would go a long way toward getting us the funds we need to establish ourselves. Contributions in any amount can be made by pushing the "Donate" button on our Web site, www.fullbellyproject.org Another option is to make a monthly donation. Sustaining donations of this sort are extremely helpful in planning and budgeting.

Allied Ronin: You gave me a video to watch. Is the video online and easy to view? If so, where can a person go to view it?
J&E: That same web site, www.fullbellyproject.org has a video of one of our trips to Uganda and another video of our efforts in the Philippines. Just click on the heading "Video". We plan on expanding our Web site in the near future.

Allied Ronin: How can people contact The Full Belly Project? John: Anyone can contact us through our Web site or at Full Belly Project, 1020 Chestnut Street, Wilmington, NC 28401 or by phoning us at 910-452-0975 or by email at info@fullbellyproject.org

Allied Ronin: is there anything else that you would like to say about the Full Belly Project and/or anything else?
John : Before Fully Belly came along, at one point I was asked what I would like to work on. I said I would like to work on world hunger. Later I though how arrogant to think any one person could have an effect on world hunger. Then my opportunity came with Full Belly. I invite your friend and associates to create their own opportunities by supporting our efforts. Thank you, Lance, for giving us this opportunity to communicate with people who could make all the difference in a world where it sometimes seems that no one cares.

Allied Ronin: Thanks so very much for taking time to let us know about The Full Belly Project and what you are doing - and most importantly, for doing it.

AFTERMATH - and continuing
Today is Friday, September 12. I am sitting in my room at the Longhill Hotel in Hangzhou China resting and getting ready to deliver two leadership trainings with the Samurai Game® (here for cultural and political reasons we call it The Warrior Game™). I am jetlagged, having arrived late last night after over twenty-four hours of driving and flying. I opened my email -and - there's message from John Fogg. I'll cut and paste the entire text for you:

From foggbird@yahoo.comLance, we just have been named an Awards Laureate by the Tech Museum in San Jose, CA. See http://www.techawards.org/laureates/ This is a huge honor and may give us needed access to Silicon Valley. Meanwhile we are trying to put together a promotional video to use for our fund raising. And as they say, it takes money to make money. We figure that the video will cost us $10,000. While that is a lot of money, it will multiple itself by acting as a promotional video for our fund raising. I wonder if you could consider putting our request on your Web site. It would be possible that one of your friends, students, associates would be willing to help us with this. As you taught us, you have to put it out there in the universe if you want the universe to respond.
Thanks, John
John M. Fogg

My reply:3:10am - Sept 12 - Hangzhou, China (just got here -- working w/jetlag) Hi John -- I'll be happy to! I'll add it to the interview that will go out, plus have it added to "home page" of www.AlliedRonin.com -- Congratulations! and love/respect to you - lance
Support The Full Belly Project www.FullBellyProject.org

Chronicle from China - Sept 13, 2008

The people are as they always have been all my past trips - very gracious. You wouldn't believe the smog tho. Worse than what I remembered in Beijing. Today I'm southeast (pretty sure) of Shanghai many miles (don't know how many but it's hundreds). Flew into Hangzhou two days ago ( I know that's southeast of Shanghai) stayed the night there. Then yesterday drove about 3 hours to get here to Yongkang ... no sun, 'cept glimpses I got of it was over my right shoulder therefore I say I was driving south ... could not make out hills that were over mile away during the drive. Everywhere brick smokestacks, tho you can only see smoke coming out of some. I didn't know if that's because what's coming out is same color as the surrounding sky OR if those were just not operating at the moment. Shame, cuz many hills are the "typical" high cone verdant shapes that come out of the rivers areas ... types that you see in travel agent posters advertising China. This morning (I just got up) it's the same. Air you wear and taste. I imagine where this will put the people health-wise in about 20 years and the magnitude of problems they will face personally and eco nomically.

Their economy is being hit also. We in the US hear that China's "growth has slowed but that it's still double digits each year" which in the US would be good news, i.e. double digits. But the talk for average person here is in terms of thousands of factories that have closed. Hard to imagine "thousands of factories" but that's what I heard. A factory could be small ... plus were talking 1.4ish billion people in the same relative land mass (+ 10k sq miles = not much) as the US and nestled between mountains except for the vastness of the Golbe Dessert.

A lot (I mean a lot) of the land that comprises the hills and in between them that I saw on the way here is terraced for ag purposes. If there's soil, something's most likely growing on it that can serve people. Very green, very pretty. I kept asking myself on the drive, "Where's the sun?" I would be magnificent if there was blue sky and sunshine.

The town I'm in, Yongkang, is very very small - only 300,000 people. Hangzhou - which I'll return to tomorrow late after noon for another program there on 17-18 (16-17 your time) - is referred to as a small city = only 3 million people (kinda redefines Petaluma and Santa Rosa!!). I thought both programs would be in Hangzhou but plans changed due to an=2 0annual "autumn festival" ... kind of like our "harvest moon" or "blue moon" because (I was told) the moon is now full tomorrow and closest this moment to earth than any time in the year ... and people come back to their families for feast this weekend, especially this Sunday. A full moon it may be ... but no one will see. People from here (Yongkang) that were interested in the class were not too keen about traveling to Hangzhou to take a seminar cuz they want to party after the class with family. But they were A-OK about me coming here. So here I am.

If I can find cable linking camera to computer I'll download pix then will send. Guess I left that cable in haste to get out the door for trip here.
As usual I tap into KGO Radio 810 via the internet, so I can have "traffic on the 8's" throughout the day... hear the weather reports, listen to Ronn Owens in the morning your time (1am my time) and Gene Burns in the evening your time ... I'd be on way home from dojo at that hour (11am here). Now if I can just get KNBR Sports Radio 680 I'll be able to listen to the Giants play baseball. So much for "being here now" ... but I gotta have at least one vice.

Walls, Boundaries, Barriers and the Like

Fixed fortifications, huh? Monuments to the stupidity of man.

When mountain ranges and oceans could be crossed anything

built by man can be overcome.

- George C. Scott (as George Patton in the film "Patton")

Robert Frost penned Mending Wall in 1914. For nearly a century now five of its most quoted words often remain misused. "Something there is," begins Frost, "that doesn't love a wall, that sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, and spills the upper boulders in the sun; and makes gaps even two can pass abreast." Frost places himself and a neighbor making their annual walk to repair the stone division between their properties after nature has completed her winter handiwork. In the midst of his share of rock laying Frost ponders aloud the need for a wall's existence. His neighbor hears this and replies with memorized certainty, "'Good fences make good neighbors.'" A reflective mood descends on him and he wonders, "Why do they make good neighbors?... Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence." Those five words were arguably meant to cause us to think and consider other possibilities, possibilities that could make walls unnecessary. Sadly, many have used those five words to justify isolation.

Ironically the year Frost contemplated the rifts between and within people and completed that poem the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo. The result: The War That Would End All Wars raged for four years, split at world, created more walls, more fear and distrust, the remains of which stand to this day, not only in a physical sense, in that part of the world ... and here.

Today is June 30, 2008. A stark image (and its accompanying title, "The Great Wall of America") rips across the cover of Time Magazine and catches my attention. I buy a copy. A solitary black line cuts the white desert sand that joins (or divides depending on your viewpoint) the United States of America and los Estados Unidos de Mexico. Unrelated and juxtaposed (my opinion) another image appears in the magazine cover's upper left hand corner: the image of a gazing down Tim Russert. A man dedicated, at least the latter years of his life, to questioning lines drawn by people... lines sometimes based on inaccuracy or dishonestly or greed or without merit (again, my opinion) fashioned by people wielding huge amounts of social, political and/or economic power.

Time's cover urges my own reflection and I recall the small mining communities of my youth: Ray, Sonora, Barcelona and Kearny, all just a few miles north of the Gila River, which also cuts - though not as unforgivingly as the fence on Time's cover - across southern Arizona. The Gila constituted the U.S.-Mexican border until 1853 when James Gadsden and Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana signed a controversial deal that moved the border dramatically south and added about thirty thousand square miles to the U.S. Given the nature the deal, had it occurred last year (2007), Gadsden and Santa Ana would likely have been invited by Russert onto Meet the Press for a good grilling. Santa Ana (President of Mexico) squandered the money received... money badly needed by his citizens; and Gadsden, our Minister to Mexico who brokered the purchase did so to make possible a rail link between Texas and the Pacific, and in the process personally acquired corporate shares of the railroad involved. Then there's the little known case of Tennessee-born William Walker. A lawyer turned filibuster and businessman, Walker's righteous outrage and zeal to secure more land for America than the Gadsden Purchase allowed, led him and his band of mercenaries into Mexico in 1853. There he established the short-lived independent Republics of Lower California and Sonora. Of course this all happened one hundred fifty-five years ago. Shenanigans of this sort involving obscure deals at high government levels, blurred lines between public service and corporate (or personal) interest, and privatized armed incursions led by American civilians onto foreign soil establishing supposed sovereignties are impossible today. Correct?

Twenty years following Gadsden's deal and Walker's incursion, copper oar was discovered in an area north of the Gila River and Aravaipa Creek confluence. In the 1870's the small towns of Ray, Sonora and Barcelona came into being and from then until the mid-1960's they circumscribed the mine that sought the copper. This mine still exists, and is today one of the world's largest. Ray, Sonora and Barcelona, on the other hand, are dead. Were you to look where they once stood you would find no evidence of their existence. Their memory literally hangs in the air.

Initially an underground operation, the Ray Mine created opportunity. Different cultures came together for work. The communities these cultures formed, however, were separated by a subjective wall. We had no name for it. It was simply "just that way." Of course no one called it segregation; because segregation was something that existed in Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama... not Arizona. For six decades the residents of Ray greeted one another with, "Good morning." In Sonora and Barcelona, both only a mile distant, the salutation was, "Buenos dias." And, unless going to or from work or church, it was unwise to cross the invisible wall, especially after dark. On foot, in a car, on a mule or horse, on a date with your girlfriend or boyfriend, to school and certainly by marriage you stayed where you were expected to stay. Then something shifted.

By the late 1940's high-grade veins of copper were being mined out. Only low-grade ore remained in the rock, rock that could neither safely or economically be taken using underground shafts. The shafts and the small compressed air locomotives needed to haul the booty were abandoned. Large treaded earth scooping "shovels" and mammoth trucks replaced them to strip and move the ground off and into the milling/smelting process. A small open pit emerged and became a symbol of progress. As the symbol (the pit) grew it forced cultures to adjust. Of necessity, people were uprooted, moved from one town to another and began living next door to each other. The pit, a physical wall of sorts, grew into and overcame the towns. The transformation ushered the demise of separation. Once kept apart by a mile-wide hole, the people (actually we, because I lived there then) were obliged to join and live with each other.

In the mid-1950's the mine pushed west. Barcelona disappeared. Sonora began to shrink. It's swimming pool vanished as did some businesses. People with names like Contreras, Mercado, Abril, Escalante and Campos ventured across the divide and found homes next door to the Smoots, Hatfields, Warrens, Tafts and the Bishops. Schools consolidated. Kids with different lineages, languages and religions had to sit next to each other in Ray's one-building high school and one-building elementary school. Not everyone liked it. Knives were common at school. Chains were carried on the streets at night. Crossing any barrier, any wall, requires not just physical action, it is often an act of the heart made in the face of fear.

People rarely abandon their fears. Even if they espouse the opposite, change of this nature takes work, effort and practice. We try, we fall down, we get up and go at it again. Life is a journey not a destination. Yes, that is cliché. That's why it's so valid! Our fears are our greatest walls and potentially our greatest anchors. In times of challenge and change it is human nature to slip back into the past even if the future is better. This is homeostasis. In Mastery, George Leonard urges an understanding of the power and the effect of homeostasis, and reminds us that every self-regulating system (we certainly are that, individually and collectively) will resist change even if the change we seek is good for the system. On pages 149 and 150 of Mastery he addresses a key tool for progress in the face of homeostasis, which he calls The Edge. He writes: "The path of mastery is built on unrelenting practice, but it's also a place of adventure. A couple on the path stays open to experience and is willing to play new games, dance new dances together. Perhaps the greatest adventure of all is intimacy: the willingness to strip away one layer of reticence after another, and on certain occasions to live entirely in the moment, revealing everything and expecting nothing in return."

America's post-war economy rushed to greet the 1960's. Industries and families were spreading across the country along with an increased press for inexpensive goods and services. Copper was in high demand so that the electricity this growth required could be transported. Similar demands rested on European nations re-emerging from WWII and united with the U.S. as NATO - racing against a Soviet Warsaw Pact living behind an Iron Curtain. The pit mine near the Gila River quickened its expansion - now spreading north and east. The backyards of Ray's inhabitants (time-honored as well as those more newly arrived from Sonora and Barcelona) were threatened and devoured - and became dumping grounds. Raw earth, we were told, would soon cover Ray's ball fields and parks. Even the graveyard was not immune. Families were informed that their departed loved ones' remains would need to be relocated. It was all hard to imagine when we were first told. But it all happened. Knowing that growth would continue and that people working and living together were essential to sustain the growth, the mining company built a new town "just down the road a bit" from Ray and Sonora and empty Barcelona. Kearny was born. A place where everyone would live together, not because we were in search of something from one another, but rather because we had to.

In 1961 while a one-upon-a-time barrier pressed different peoples of our communities to live and communicate together, a barrier of a different nature, an actual wall, was under construction 5,636 miles to the east. Berlin. And its purpose: separate a single city populated by like peoples; force them to part and communicate no more.

Walls. They seemed to be everywhere.

The morphing of Ray and Sonora into a singular Kearny gave rise to new challenges and opportunities, e.g. the five structures housing differing religious perspectives now had to co-exist in closer proximity. The volume of weekend rhetoric espousing each one's separate, yet correct TRUTH got louder on certain street corners. Distinct divisions were drawn in verbal sand. Righteousness (in whatever form) was no longer contained within the structures that housed the pulpits and pews; it found its way into cafés and bars, playgrounds and schools. Everyone knew who to hang out with and who to avoid, who was right and who was wrong, and who was and wasn't going to make it to the Other Side.

As I read the main article "A New Line In the Sand" in today's Time, I am particularly struck by a paragraph near its end and find myself looking beyond these words as a strict application to a border between two countries. David Von Drehle writes:

"What the fence tells us, then, is that marking the border and aggressively patrolling it can reduce illegal activity. The fence also carries a lesson about limits, for it is only as effective as the force that backs it up. Even the Great Wall of China was not impermeable. Osmosis explains why concentrations of water seek equilibrium across a barrier. Something similar applies to money. The difference in per capita income between the U.S. and Mexico is among the greatest cross-border contrasts in the world, according to David Kennedy, a noted historian at Stanford. As long as that remains true, the border fence will be under extreme pressure. People will climb over it; they'll tunnel under it" they'll hack through it; they'll float around it." (p 35, Time, VOL. 171, No. 26 / 2008)

Boundaries are important especially with regards respect, dignity, understanding and learning to live with others. But walls can also become hard, steadfast and rigid. They can eliminate the potential and possibility for future communication. There is a serious problem, I suggest, when the statement that a barrier or wall makes becomes more important than the potential for future constructive communication that the wall blocks; communication that honorably could come through to find common ground and understanding for a harmonious future. Harmony is not static tolerance. It is a dynamic dance of separate tones. It evokes grace, ease, joy, spontaneity and moments of playful surprise.

I look at the cover of today's Time again and find myself thinking about boundaries: personal and group. Walls are not single-functioned, one-sided structures. I gaze again and think, "Hmmmm, what if someone - a U.S. citizen - standing near that border saw an oncoming brush fire, or a swarm of hornets, or an angry mob or gang approaching from the north, or an unjust sheriff or a body of government officials (when did we start referring to public servants as government officials?), or a bully, or a deranged person carrying a club, or a despot - or a system clever enough to successfully scam people out of their voice (its responsibility, authority and freedom) and into a comfortable cloak called security - woven by threads comprised of promises. (Have you ever seen anything in nature that is actually static and therefore secure?) And suppose that that person needed to move... to walk or quickly flee south ... in order to avoid the fire or the disease or the bully, etc., for the sake of health or preservation or freedom for himself or herself or the family. Well then, the wall wouldn't be keeping anyone out... it would be keeping that person in. We have to understand that walls are impersonal and those with little or no doors, or doors that are controlled by the few can house prisons. For eighteen months I weekly visited a prison doing volunteer work. It always struck me that in many ways that the inmates were not the only prisoners who lived there. The inmates were the prisoners that stayed overnight. Ahhhh... but this is all kind of far-fetched imagining when considered within the context of "The Great Wall of America" on Time's cover. Isn't it?

This past Friday and Saturday I delivered a program www.SamuraiGame.org for Run Rhino , a Santa Cruz, California consulting firm. The program included an interactive aikido demonstration, which when completed opened to a reflective dialogue for participants who translated lessons the demonstration provided into issues relevant to relationship and communication. Aikido is a martial art dedicated to promote harmonious resolution to all conflicts. One of the participants, a woman from Canada, offered, "I saw simultaneous acts of leading and following, and it made me think of the possible agreements and solutions that could rise out of conflict, agreements and solutions that could come into being - but only if people are willing to look for, create, and share a common language... not just words, but a language based on understanding."

Today is Monday, June 30^th. I'm sitting at my desk looking out onto Prospect Street here in Petaluma, California. Having these thoughts and writing these words and wondering if the underlying fabric of the notion of walls and barriers and boundaries really matters in any way to anyone in particular. This is my nineteenth year in Petaluma; I've lived here longer than anywhere else in my life... including the communities of Ray, Sonora, Barcelona and Kearny. I've been (and am) a Petaluma west-side resident. Hail to the Trojans! - Petaluma High School's mascot (this side of town). I've been an east-side Petaluma resident, too. Hurray for the Gouchos! The mascot for Casa Grande High School (the other side of town). Petaluma's a nice place: fifty-five thousand people divided right down the middle by a freeway; old farms, heritage homes and chicken houses to the west; stucco and high-tech buildings to the east. Friendly competition.

I look out the window this morning. A man walks down the north side of the street. He's walked this way everyday since I moved into my house. His motion breaks my concentration. He passes #510 Prospect across the way and enters more of my field of vision. I find myself wondering, "What will he do today?" Each morning he shuffles by here wearing a cap and an oversized black windbreaker. His shoes, sneakers, look out of place for his age. He has a bushy mustache. He's headed east (as usual) to the corner of Prospect and Walnut Streets where a yellow fire hydrant adjacent to a stop sign stands like a silent sentry guarding the neighborhood. In the past this fellow has always stopped at the hydrant, gazed east ... then south... then west from whence he came ... then east and south again. It's obvious he's pondering. Something inside him is talking. It's as if he's listening for someone to say, "It's OK. You can go across Walnut Street today and continue walking two blocks to Liberty Street, or wherever else you want to go." But I've never seen him take a step to cross over Walnut Street. In fact, I've never seen his foot depart the sidewalk and touch the pavement. He always turns north after his pattern of gazing and shuffles up the road away from where I look. He always disappears into the shadows until the morrow when he comes back - again from the west and headed east. I don't judge him, but I am curious. I wonder about him. He looks like a nice guy. I think someone probably cares a lot about him. Today I find myself quietly rooting, "Go ahead ... take the step ... it's OK... it really is." Then I go still and watch. He stops, considers the hydrant, gazes east, gazes south ... turns back to look west, then to the east and south again. Interestingly, now, he moves diagonally to the storm drain right at the edge of the walkway and looks down. And then ...

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

...

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

...

Before I build a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down. I could say, 'Elves' to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself.

...

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says it again, 'Good fences make good neighbours.'

... he turns and proceeds north, as he has each day for quite a long time.

What are the walls we, you and I, live by? The ones between us? The ones within us?

What do they serve? What don't they serve? What do they cost?

What do they wall in? What do they wall out?

Are they worth it? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

if not, then what can be done about this ... if only in some small measure ... today?

Do it.

The Afterward. It's early Thursday morning, July 3^rd, 2008. Tomorrow is Independence Day. I'm at Starbucks. I walked across Petaluma a little while ago, over the freeway to the east side, to shop and have a cup of coffee where my youngest son works. In a little while I'll walk back to my home office. No one's permission needed for the journey, except mine. It's a long way to walk for a cup of coffee, but that's OK because I can combine exercise with errands, and errands with breakfast, and breakfast with the possibility of seeing a young man at his first real job. I can save gas, too. No car needed, just a good pair of sneakers. Above my head the sound system is piping out music. I strain a bit to hear the tune. Starbucks sells good CDs in addition to good coffee. They play their music low so that customers are enveloped by subtle background sounds. Similarly, the background aroma of fresh coffee heightens the possibility that some in the store will be influenced into buying another cup. Smart marketing. It helps drive sales. Lord knows Starbucks needs help. Yesterday's headlines included news that the mega-chain will soon close six hundred U.S. stores. I hope my son keeps his job. But, there is no such thing as stability, and there are no guarantees. It's out of his (and my) hands. A job lost won't be the end of the world, just an opportunity to deal with change. A learning experience. I strain a bit more to hear the music. I think I recognize the duo, but it sounds like a live recording, not the studio version that was one of my favorites at Ray District High School back in Kearny. Sure enough it's them - Paul & Art - live! I listen ... and I hear:

A winters day

In a deep and dark December;

I am alone,

Gazing from my window to the streets below

On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.

I am a rock,

I am an island.

I've built these walls,

A fortress deep and mighty,

That none may penetrate.

I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.

Its laughter and its loving I disdain.

I am a rock,

I am an island.

Don't talk of love,

I've heard that word before;

It's sleeping in my memory.

I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.

If I never loved I never would have cried.

I am a rock,

I am an island.

I have my books

And my poetry to protect me;

I am shielded in my armor,

Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.

I touch no one and no one touches me.

I am a rock,

I am an island.

And a rock feels no pain;

And an island never cries.

On the recording the crowd cheers wildly. Sitting at Starbucks I mist up and almost cry. But I stop. Someone might not understand or think I'm weird, so I keep my feelings inside. I'm caught ... still learning ... still practicing. Walls, they seem to be everywhere.

© Lance Giroux,