Exploring Nature, Culture and Inner Life

Irene Borger Ten Thousand Joys and Ten Thousand Sorrows ~Co-presented with the Institute for Art and Healing~ Attention Listeners: You may want to do some writing while you listen along with the participants of this event. If so, have a pen and some paper handy and use the pause or start/stop buttons of your audio player to pause the audio while you reflect and write. The sources of our writing life – the range of joys and sorrows – are close at hand: What we have seen, heard, smelled, touched and been touched by, what we remember, how we have befriended our life experiences through words. Whether we are dealing with illness, creating something from scratch, or just going about our business in the wild world, we are always swimming in the stream of the unknown. Transformed through the eyes of curiosity, uncertainty becomes vitality, and the core of our creative life. Irene talks with Jaune Evans about her life as a writer, master teacher, and muse—and offers an opportunity for the audience to participate in simple exercises that invite discovery, playfulness, and, no less important, a bit of exhalation. No prior experience or talent is required. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

Stephen Parker, PhD Jung, Art, and Healing I have been struggling with this never-ending wound for more than a year, and still it haunts me by the hour. A heart attack is also a deeply isolating event. Others act as if their lives will go on forever, but how can I participate in this charade, knowing deeply and irrevocably that any moment could be my last one? I identify much more with people who have terminal illness than with those who are caught up in the illusions and routines of everyday life. In hopes of reducing this isolation and finding a way through this purgatory, I thought I would try to post a daily blog about the experience. I am fascinated and struck by the story of Chiron, that mythical Centaur who had a permanent wound in his knee that would not heal. In Puget’s painting, Achilles is being dragged by his rationality, his head, and it looks like there isn’t much he can do about it. Not particularly wanting to be hunted, I have to somehow find out just where this heart attack is leading me. With these words written in his blog, Dr. Parker begins an exploration – in words and paintings – of the dreams and meanings around his 2005 soul-changing heart attack. In The New School conversation with Michael Lerner February 19, Dr. Parker talks about this journey and presents the opening of his show at Commonweal Gallery. His talk was followed by a gallery reception. Stephen Parker, PhD Stephen is has lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, since 1980, consulting in many of the Alaskan communities as a psychologist and as an expert witness in all of the superior courts of Alaska. In 2005, he experienced a severe heart attack, changing the focus of his life. He now works extensively with people with chronic illness and life-threatening conditions. Stephen is a graduate of Stanford University and the California School of Professional Psychology – San Diego. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

Donald Abrams, MD, and Clint Werner Marijuana: Is It Medicine Yet? Please join us for a science-based talk and conversation with Donald Abrams and Clint Werner on the medicinal uses of this ancient herbal remedy. Donald Abrams, MD Don is one of the world’s foremost experts on the medicinal uses of marijuana, especially for cancer. He is professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and chief of hematology/oncology at San Francisco General Hospital. He provides integrative oncology consultations at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. Clint Werner Clint is author of Marijuana: Gateway to Health: How Cannabis Protects Us from Cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease, which Andrew Weil, M.D., says “should be required reading for all medical professionals, elected officials, and everyone interested in health and wellness.” He has worked in preventive health for more than 25 years. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

Tom Nash Our Particular Universe: Understanding What We Know, What We Don't Know (Yet) See article about the event on Michael Lerner’s blog. Join Michael Lerner in a conversation with physicist Tom Nash in a combination physics tutorial and cosmology exploration… pondering questions such as whether there is one universe or many, whether the universe is alive or inert, and whether life is an accident or part of a cosmic design. Tom helps us understand some challenging, very current, and surprisingly related subjects. These include: The conceptually difficult “Standard Model,” and the Higgs Boson (aka the “God” particle); Stephen Hawkings’s beautiful book The Grand Design about the structure of the universe and the suggestions that there is a multi-universe, of which ours is just one of a huge number; The technically heroic search for gravitational waves. Tom Nash Tom is now an emeritus scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where he spent more than 30 years as an experimental high-energy and astro physicist, a high-performance computer developer, and finally as associate director for Computing and Technology. He is presently a member of the California Institute of Technology group collaborating on the LIGO Gravitational Wave Project. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

Eric Karpeles The Last Threshold: Artists and Mortality Bolinas painter and writer Eric Karpeles will talk about the role that artists have played in helping to imaginatively frame and comprehend the idea of how we cease to be. How is it that artists, engaged in the most willful need to express their very beings, seem to overcome the fear of the loss of self? Focusing on three distinct art forms—painting, poetry and music—and three supreme practitioners—Mark Rothko, Emily Dickinson and Gustav Mahler—Karpeles will attempt to create an awareness of how, in their struggle to give voice, artists make use of their accumulated subjective experience to look and listen and learn with acute attention and focus, navigating between the physical world and the life of the mind. The boundary between what we know and what we cannot know is a minefield of stimulation for artists, who help teach us by example how to meaningfully embrace the end that awaits us all. Erik Karpeles Commonweal Board Member Eric Karpeles is a painter and writer. Born and raised in New York, he has also lived in India and in France, settling in Bolinas in 2007. His painting career has been shaped by the quest for a spiritual presence in art, and by a negative response to the elitism of the contemporary marketplace. The Rockefeller Chapel is a room-sized painting he completed in 1996, a permanent installation at the HealthCare Chaplaincy in New York City. Karpeles writes about painting and the intersection of literature and visual aesthetics; his book, Paintings in Proust, translated into several languages, was a “book of the year” in the NY Times, the Times of London, and The Wall Street Journal. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

Cam Trowbridge West Marin County and Marconi's Dream Around-the-World Wireless Network This presentation—followed by a conversation with The New School’s Kyra Epstein—held at the Point Reyes National Seashore’s Red Barn, focused on Guglielmo Marconi’s construction and operation of two wireless radio stations in Bolinas and Marshall between 1912 and 1919. Marconi’s ambitions and business acumen, the topic of his 2010 book, will be explained in relation to the sites near Bolinas and Marshall that could connect wirelessly with Hawaii. In 1916, service to Hawaii opened, and, through Hawaii, to Japan. In World War I, the U.S. Navy took over operation of stations owned by American Marconi, a subsidiary of British Marconi. In 1919, after World War I, the United States government, led by the U.S. Navy, forced British Marconi to sell American Marconi to General Electric and its subsidiary, the Radio Corporation of America, thereby ending Marconi’s participation in the California stations. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

Rebecca Katz and Jeanne Wallace, PhD The Cancer-Fighting Kitchen A cancer diagnosis is shocking, disorienting, and capable of scrambling anybody’s mental GPS—not to mention their culinary compass. To find a stabilizing force, a grounding activity such as cooking and eating well can provide more than nourishment; it can offer a huge psychological boost. Join Rebecca, Jeanne, and Michael Lerner for a presentation and discussion about the healing power of food. When you get a cancer diagnosis, suddenly you become a very powerless person. A nutritional plan can give a sense of empowerment. So many common foods—everything from broccoli to blueberries—have multiple cancer-fighting properties, including everyday herbs and spices ranging from ginger to cinnamon to turmeric. In addition to supporting you nutritionally, they can help quell side effects ranging from nausea to fatigue. Download Jeanne’s presentation here. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

Robert Hass, Eric Karpeles, and Others Community Reading of Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself' In 1855, Whitman published 795 copies of his book Leaves of Grass, paying for publication himself. “Song of Myself,” as it came to be known, was the first experiment in long, free-verse poetry—a poem that former U.S. poet laureate and Whitman scholar Robert Hass calls, “the most unprecedented poem in the English language.” The poem is Whitman’s “song” about democracy and imagination, life and death. With an introduction by Robert Haas, local volunteers read the 52 numbered sections of the 1891 “Deathbed” edition of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself in its entirety. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

David Spangler Apprenticed to Spirit Michael Lerner talks with David Spangler about his life and his recent book, Apprenticed to Spirit. Apprenticed is a memoir of David’s journey to understanding how we can learn to lead lives of greater blessing and to be sources of blessing and service for the world as a whole. In the book, David documents his encounter in 1965 with an extraordinary presence, which he named “John,” and which over the next quarter-century would be his colleague and mentor, assisting him in exploring the “inner worlds” of the spirit. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

Richard Heinberg The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality ~Co-presented with Post Carbon Institute, Point Reyes Books, the Regenerative Design Institute, Transition West Marin, and the Mainstreet Moms~ Economics has failed us . . . but there is life after growth! Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. Richard Heinberg’s latest book, The End of Growth, proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits. In conversation with Michael Lerner, Richard explores the ongoing financial crisis—explaining how and why it occurred; what we must do to avert the worst potential outcomes; and what policy makers, communities, and families can do to build a new economy that operates within Earth’s budget of energy and resources. Richard Heinberg Richard Heinberg is the author of ten books—including The Party’s Over, Peak Everything, and The End of Growth—and a senior fellow-in-residence at Post Carbon Institute. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. With a wry, unflinching approach based on facts and realism, Richard exposes the tenuousness of our current way of life and offers a vision for a truly sustainable future. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.