All in a moment

Sitting down
Gazing into the unknown
Stars so bright
Whispers in the dark
Nothing again
It's all gone

A flash with a tail
Stars shooting at each other
The sky so innocent
Yet hold all the answers
Perhaps some rain
So we can live
Maybe a chill this time
A cuddle is in order

Unstoppable tears
A plague unleashed
The sun will shine
smiles return
All in a moment
Gazing into the unknown

- David Jamali

From one station to another - with love

Change...

What's next

Under the trains of thought where the gaps gather our urges and intent lie the underpass - What's next. A place where you can escape to the other side but first you must pass through the shaddows and shades of The Gap. Look out!

Keep your coins i want change

It has been interesting to follow the posts to my crowd map (http://www.urgesandintent.crowdmap.com/) and see that most people are interested in presenting their hopes. As discussed in a previous post this is understandable as people want to think about thier hopes and the positives to move them in the right direction. In community development we are interested in strengths based approaches not defecit or needs based approaches. However I see the space between as not just about being wonder but also very fragile, a palce of caution and great vulnerability. It can also result in bad things happening. Vulnerablity and those who are vulnerable (we call in community development the 'most vulnerable') and often they know more about relationships and how it is to be human than those not vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to understand what it is to be human and through these vulnerabilities we form stong bonds with others and with ourselves. These bonds help us through good times and bad. So whilst the opportunty in the gap or the space between may be wonderous we may learn more about ourselves and move out of the gap more empowered if we recognise the fragility and vulnerability of this human existance.

Back to my Roots - Orford, U.K., April 2011

This movie was made during a recent trip to the U.K. I trace my Great Great Grandfathers final steps before he set sail for Australia in the mid 1850s never to return home. I wonder what would make a person take such a step, and how has his past decisions informed who I am today.

Finding hope in the space between

A lot seems to be happening in the space between. Initial uploads to my crowdmap (http://www.urgesandintent.crowdmap.com/) shows that people are far more interested and inclined to share their hopes and what inspires them to change rather than what forces them into change (their fears). It reminds me of the stregths based approaches or appreciative enquiry that is used in community development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appreciative_inquiry). Basically it is about building upon the strengths of an individual or a community rather than the needs or deficits. People know that they are in a bad way sometimes and dwelling on it does not help. Focusing on their strengths and possibilities opens up space and motivation to move in a more positive direction. Further, it is about creating enabling environments for change and not just enabling people. It is about making space for change and supporting people (the most vulnerable) to fill that space with something better.

Also important is that if we truly want the poor and most vulnerable to participate in their own development we must engage them through what inspires or excites them rather than pointing out how hopeless they are. I am therefore moving toward looking at the positive drivers of change rather than what forces people to change as a focus for my work in the gap - the space between. We must find positive triggers that fire off to push development felt by all in a positive direction. By focusing on positives we may move the forces within the space to be more positive thus influencing other processes as well. Important though is I am not only looking at people to positively influence this space but also other animals and objects. Also it appears that people are quite affected by light and dark and so this may be one aspect of the space between as well. There is something in the gap, something in this space, it is more subtle than just a picture of Gandhi, or a sunny day, it is there and it can be felt and I am going to reach out and try and touch it through my works.

The Space Between

Engaging in development work attracts a variety of metaphors. Development workers, together with community and partners, the architects of community change. We build foundations, frameworks and structures out of our human successes and failures. And as development professionals and institutions we commonly engage through the medium of projects and programs. In other words there’s often a complex dance of joint interventions that aim at both saving lives whilst working to build and strengthen robust systems and structures. As co-contributors or architects for change we must therefore be continually mindful of the role we play in building a collective community future. My role and the role explored in this article is that of a Country Program Coordinator (CPC) for World Vision Australia. This article explores the implications for my role of a three-month secondment to World Vision Kenya, as opposed to the regular fleeting monitoring visit normally undertaken by CPCs.

Read the full article: http://www.worldvision.com.au/Libraries/Annual_Program_Review_2011/The_space_between.sflb.ashx

Nancy's first train ride

Taken with little Nancy during her first train ride whilst I was with her in England

The Queen and I

A self portrait of myself and my wife - taken in Boma N'gombe Tanzania

Poems from the Gap 2

You could see history in the lines of her eyes
Her children in the shape of her breasts
Burden of the earth on the soles of their feet
Her beads tell me a story, one which I shall keep

A time where her father’s wishes came true
A time where there was water and food
Only to be filled with dust and heat
Across vast distances of time and space

Now we stand face to face, I follow her journey
Filled with pride and sorrow as I hold her hand
And study the burden of the earth on the soles of her feet
Her beads tell me a story, one for each day, one which I shall keep

***

I am a wave at sea, longing for the shore
I am angry with the world, having decided to kill it
with love and nothing more

***

this is not my journey
I am just passing through
this space between
the ghosts and shaddows
shared with you

***

A bird perched on a bridge railing
Ready to jump
Suicide is never the best option
For the plagiarisms of life

Metta and Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the practice of keeping your mind focused, your breath steady, and your heart calm. It fosters the development of quiet yet alert mind, wisdom and compassion. As you become calm and your heart still, you are able to look into the true nature of things. Mindfulness is not about suppressing pain. In fact, it is the opposite. Mindfulness helps us turn toward a deeper place of authentic present-moment feelings, thoughts, needs and resources. Through a calm heart and still mind, we are able to touch the painful spots in our life.

Mindfulness is the powerful practice of looking deeply into our pain leading the way for understanding, compassion and loving kindness. It is through loving kindness, that we are finally able to transform the seeds of suffering in to peace and joyousness. In the East, mindfulness has been a primary tool of spiritual exploration for thousands of years. In the West, it is being increasingly employed as a fundamental healing modality.

from: http://www.radicaltransformation.com/Radical_Transformation.html

Poems from the Gap

The faces of hatred
and those of affection
here to stay and love us
whatever our direction

Hope rubs shoulders
and elbows are sharpened
the swords of attrition
cutting open the new day

Lanterns swing from their handles
as light peers in
Those eyes are upon us
we cannot hide from them

This is a time of hope and promise
of new beginnings
This is a rare chance
as fear takes its grip, I can already feel it slipping

***

One more hill
One more valley
These bananas are heavy
today

I’ve never tasted
the dirt
I’ve never seen
my skin

Shimmer and shake
under the Acacia tree
I can dig for water
I can dig down deep

Then lay these shady bones
to chatter and chant
about times past

When bananas weren’t heavy
and the world was flat

***

Washing our hands
We feast on coffee beans

Women in kangas
The sound of a drum
Whooo la la la la
Someone is getting married

But why is she so sad?
Does she not love him?
Or is it the years of hard work ahead?

No my dear
Have you never been so happy
That it made you sad?

***

Urges and Intent

Urges and Intent , a set on Flickr.

Photo's from The Gap

"Mind The Gap"

Development is movement from one place to another. Some see this movement as postive or negative. Communities can be seen as people on a platform. Some know each other, some dont but there is a sense of 'community', a sense of togetherness, a sense of purpose. To go somewhere or to observe others going somewhere. Some know exactly where they are going, some don't. Some choose to go where they are going some have to go. Some are in a hurry and some are relaxed and have all day. The train is development, driven by the architects of change. The drivers are unknown but what is know is that there is a driver. People get onto a carriage and leave their motivations in the gap as they get on. When they enter the carriage they are met by others already there. They then form a new 'community'. Whilst this community is physically constrained within the carriage they are still communicating with the world outside via internet or their phones. Some get off, some wait until the end of the line, some even choose to get out and then jump in front of the next train. What is interesting to me though is not all the conversations or the destinations that people reach but that energy that is used by every individual when they make a decision to move from one point to another. If we understand this gap this space between where this energy lays we will see the successes and failures of individuals and communities both past and present. Mind the Gap!

Department of Change Studies

How people understand and think about development is in a state of constant churn and upheaval. Some ideas are genuinely new, prompted by new technologies and ground-breaking political movements. Other ideas are old, previously discarded for reasons both bad and good, that resurface, often to be acclaimed as radically new; new concepts are pulled in from other disciplines such as medicine and physics, or from rich-world debates. Here are a few examples from recent months.

Firstly, something that may feel a bit retro, but that is definitely on the way back: the role of resource constraints in prompting violent spikes in food prices and a disastrous turnaround in global progress on ending hunger. Planetary boundaries on atmospheric space (how much CO2 we can produce without screwing the climate), water use, fertile soil, available energy and the like are starting to become much more serious constraints on economic activity.

If resources are limited, who gets what becomes much more pressing, and the danger is that poor people will be sent to the back of the queue, potentially undoing decades of progress on development. ‘Feeding the 9 billion’ reports are proliferating, but they often focus on technical solutions, ignoring the issues of power, politics and who gets what. In June Oxfam is launching a global campaign on precisely this issue.

Secondly, development types have long talked of the ‘North in the South’ – rich elites in poor countries – and the ‘South in the North’ – marginalised groups and rising inequality in the rich world. What we are now seeing is a much more comprehensive obliteration of the North-South distinction as a range of supposedly ‘Northern’ policy issues become more pressing in poor countries: aging populations, rapid urbanization; the role of domestic taxation rather than just aid in confronting poverty and inequality; the case for universal welfare states, guaranteeing healthcare, education and social protection; mental illness; disability and even obesity. On this last point, Mexico is the second most obese country on the planet after the US, and obesity and malnutrition coexist in many developing countries, bringing sharp rises in non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

Most traditional development organizations have struggled to address these topics either in their public messaging (can you imagine an Oxfam campaign on obesity?) or conceptually (for example ‘peasant romanticism’ and a focus on rural poverty remains deeply entrenched despite rapid urbanization). More generally, the ‘them and us’ mental frame, that poor people in poor countries have different lives, experiences and issues to those in the North, is proving hard to overcome.

Thirdly, the multipolar world is just as big a cliché in development circles as everywhere else. The rise of the BRICS and the relative decline of the West, epitomised by the marginalization of the EU at the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009, and accelerated by the two speed response to the global meltdown of 2008-9, have changed the landscape at an astonishing speed. We have barely begun to understand what such tectonic activity means.

The new world order will be one of networks and variable groupings, rather than fixed hierarchies like the G8. And aid agencies won’t like every aspect of what is generally a welcome redistribution of global power – the G20, the new top table, seems much more interested in growth than aid, for example. OK, it is ‘growth with adjectives,’ sustainable, resilient, inclusive, but will such words prove window dressing and will the world return to the disastrous delusions of Thatcher-Reagan ‘trickle down economics’? If so, expect inequality to leap and poverty reduction to stall.

Finally, the way we think about development, the concepts we use, is constantly evolving. Take theories of change. NGOs and others frequently call themselves ‘agents of change’, yet they invest remarkably little in honing their understanding of change processes and how to react to them. There is no Department of Change Studies’ we can turn to for help.

What kinds of change are predictable; which ones can we plan for? Which, like the Arab Spring, are entirely unpredictable and ‘emergent’ and how good are we at responding to those? In general aid agencies are better at understanding and responding to discontinuous change when it comes to natural disasters than political events – why is that? And is there an advocacy role for NGOs to play in these rapidly-changing societies?

Of course a focus on ‘what’s new’ runs the risk of ignoring ‘what isn’t new’, such as. the bread and butter issues of development: reducing poverty; supporting active citizens and their efforts to build effective, accountable states; fighting for universal health care, education, access to water and food; and equal rights for all women and men.


From:

http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=4901

Urges and Intent - The Instalation

The Installation Urges and Intent is a fountain. A fountain that all urges and intents are put and that are recycled and flowing.This fountain is made of wood, with four levels to it. The reason why it is four levels is that this seems to be a common memory held by most humans to go back to as a reference. That is from the child to the great grandparent and not beyond, four generations. The four levels of these large wooden ponds are one above each other with a wooden column holding them apart. I imagine it to be like a tree but quite perfect in shape and dimensions. I thought of making it quite organic but I wanted to try and depict how it would look in the mind. Such as in the mind we can imagine perfect objects that don't exist in reality. I suppose like we read in class, Plato's work.

Around the edges at each level of the fountain are figures of humans and animals in cast iron. They are in cast iron as they have fixed urges and intentions at any one event. I have not fully worked out what types of humans or animals will be placed at different levels. I thought first poodles and corporate bankers would be at the top level and farm workers and sheep at the bottom. But I felt it played into a stereotype I am not comfortable or agreeable with. So I am playing around with who I think should be at each level. All of the animals and human characters have water coming out of them, some like they are urinating some coming out their mouths. Where this water is coming out of them is where I see these different characters and animals having urges and intent that feed into the common experience to all living things on this planet. As the water from the characters hits the main body of water in the pond it causes ripples, ripples that cause water to flow in different directions and flow over the edges of the first pond and down into the second one. When the water hits the rim of the pond it causes different sounds depending on where it hits, these sounds would be caused by which character is poring the most or least water into the pond.

I would put this installation in a very public place with a mixture of people from all walks of life like fed square. People will be able to interact with this installation by pressing buttons of characters they most relate to. Then more water would come out of those characters to affect the ripples on the water. Also in the centre of each pond would be a column that hold the ponds apart and there it would be covered by mirrors. When a person presses a button for which character they want more water to come out of, not only does that happen but a name of each character is digitally displayed on the surface of the mirrors. This is for different reasons but I kind of wanted to find a spiritual dimension to this installation that was reflective of human experience (maybe the reflections in the mirrors is like seeing God).

Famous quotes about change

• Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future - John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
• It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change - Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
• You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
• Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced - James Baldwin (1924-1987)
• You can't expect to meet the challenges of today with yesterday's tools and expect to be in business tomorrow- Unknown Source
• To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often - Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
• When it becomes more difficult to suffer than change -- then you will change - Unknown Source
• Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
• To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly - Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
• When you're finished changing, you're finished - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)



from: http://en.proverbia.net/citastema.asp?tematica=174

The Bird

My little brother told me that when he dies he wants to come back as a bird. That was nearly 30 years ago now and we’re both still here. In the literal sense that is. He laughs when I remind him of it. How every night when we lay on our bunks that he wished he would dream of being a bird. The thought consumed him. It was exciting to witness. With the morning came disappointment. After a night of dreaming, flying over hills and down valleys, he woke realising he was still human.

He could never tell me why he wanted to be a bird, nor that his bird of choice was a sparrow. I thought surely he could aim for something a little more grand. A parrot, emu or bird of prey. But no, he just wanted to be a sparrow. Imagine, now he is an advisor to the Prime Minister!

I suppose though we are all birds, imitating natures creation in one way or another. Strutting around like the emu, impressing women with our colourful feathers like the peacock , or sitting thoughtfully like the owl. There are thousands of birds, I must also be one of them! One night when sitting by an African campfire I was reminded of my brothers desire to become a sparrow. The elder said;

‘It was time to elect a new king of the birds, but no-one could agree what the rules of the election should be. Small birds said it should be a small bird this time, sea birds said it was their turn to rule, the big forest birds who live alone got nervous with the crowding and noise and went off to sulk and say it should have been them, the geese wanted there to be a new ruler every twenty minutes. At last the hawks said quietly but fiercely it would be one of them, and chased the rest away. Some of them went up in the air to fight, but the vultures just watched and waited. So did the great fish eagle. The fighters came down for a rest and to mend their feathers. The fish eagle asked who had won, and they said it was a tie. The fish eagle said whoever won could fight him for the crown, but when they all looked at his terrible claws and beak - they made him king’.

As I sat by that fire I wondered, where would my brother fit in? As a sparrow he would certainly not be king. Would he still have a good life? Could he decide over his own life and be free as I suspected he dreamed of as a child? I suppose that would depend on the fish eagle, the king. This king that through no real effort of its own ruled over all the birds, no matter how brightly coloured, no matter how hard working. Just by the weapons he held of claws and a beak. Just to be born a king.

 When I think of that night I think of one thing, there are so many sparrows in the world and in comparison only few fish eagles. Surely the sparrows could reign over the fish eagles? In a democratic bird state the sparrows could vote the fish eagles out of office. And if the fish eagles were tyrannical dictators sparrows could surely outnumber them with pure force. But it is still the case that the fish eagle is king, and it is still the case that my brother wishes to be a sparrow. A sparrow that advises the Prime Minister.

The king is dead, long live the king.