Dana Dakin Wins Prestigious Award For WomensTrust’s Micropath to Major Results
May 26, 2010
“You know, there’s just so much, sometimes you just have to turn away and pretend it’s not happening,” a usually thoughtful friend recently told me in response to some bad news from Africa.
Dana Dakin, a retired financial marketing consultant, proved otherwise seven years ago when, to mark her 60th birthday, she set off from her home in Wilmot Flat, N.H., for Pokuase, Ghana.
With $5,000 from the sale of a used Volvo, she founded WomensTrust, a microlending project that now has more than 1,000 women are now clients. Moreover, after Dakin recognized that people needed more than just access to loans to lift themselves from poverty, WomensTrust— in collaboration with women in Pokuase and volunteers from New England—added critical education and healthcare programs that are changing lives and earning the non-profit widespread recognition as an emerging model for microfinance in Africa.
Recently, the Women’s Bond Club of New York, one of the nation’s oldest professional organizations for women in finance, awarded Dana the prestigious Isabel Benham Award and $25,000, on behalf of her organization, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the lives of women.
“Our clients take the resources we provide and, against daunting odds, created a path of their own: safety for their families and opportunity to advance economically and socially,” she said. You can read about Dana in my book’s chapter “One Woman, Two Villages.” Here’s a short film about WomensTrust:
Gratitude: Patti Smith, Budget Threat To NYPL, And Moral Motivation
May 20, 2010
With Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget threatening to devastate the New York Public Library with an historic $37 million cut, it may seem a curious choice to harness rocker Patti Smith, the library, and idea of moral motivation with the word “gratitude.” So, stick with me.
A couple of weeks ago, writing in the Huffington Post, library President Paul LeClerc outlined ample reasons to dread the proposed cuts:
At the moment that they are most needed, the free services offered by The New York Public Library in 90 libraries across the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island - including job search assistance - are imperiled. Additionally, if Bloomberg’s cut is adopted next month, more than 25% of all library jobs in New York would be eliminated, six million fewer items would be circulated, and ten libraries would be closed. Perhaps most devastating, computer access critical to the city’s youth and poor, would be reduced by an estimated two million sessions. Anyone who has read Marilyn Johnson’s fascinating new work, This Book Is Overdue will appreciate how much more is at stake.
Why then talk about gratitude?
Well, first, there’s Patti Smith. Searching on the Internet for discussion of the proposed cuts, I came across her appearance at the New York Public Library on April 29. In addition to chatting up Just Kids, her memoir about her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the poet and one-time Brentano’s book clerk rose to the defense of the library. But it was her performance of her song “Grateful” that moved me most:
And that got me thinking about what my first heart-thumping, imagination-flaring visit to the New York Public Library and why gratitude might be a better public relations strategy for restoring the cuts than fear.
[Blog Post Continued]
At some point in high school, I was faced with a project I could not adequately research in the library in Long Beach, N.Y., where I lived. I no longer recall what possessed me, but one Saturday morning I boarded an LIRR train and made my first solo trip into Manhattan. I felt bravely cosmopolitan as I walked from Penn Station to great library on 42nd Street. I paid no heed to the giant sculpted lions that guard the library’s impressive front steps. But inside, everything changed. A trembling reverence overtook me when I stepped into the main reading room, as long as a football field, and when I handed a librarian my penciled call card. I waited—with my heart in my throat—for my books to be delivered from the miles of stacks. I spent the day reading—or trying to—at the old-fashioned library table with brass lamps, in the most awesome room in which I had ever set foot.
I was simultaneously transported, distracted, and transformed. I’m not sure if I could have articulated it then, but I felt privileged—lucky to sit in that cathedral of learning. I felt electrified by the energy of minds at work around me. And as I watched men and women of every type and class turn pages and take notes, stare into space and fasten on phrases, I was swept away by the boundless potential of the place, by its mysterious majesty, and by the sense that this was democracy’s paradise. When I eventually left for the train home, I felt an irrevocable pride about what I had learned and where I had learned it.
I still feel grateful for that day, and I carry that gratitude with me every time I enter a library, no matter its size.
And it’s that kind of gratitude—a sense of what we might personally have lost if we hadn’t had the privilege of libraries and access to information that people should be asked to recall as they consider the proposed cuts. Why? Well, one reason is that it has everything to do with the way expressing and feeling gratitude affects moral behavior.
For the last decade or so, scientists have been catching up with philosophers, psychologists, and the religious in concluding that gratitude is a critically potent agent of human health, wholeness, and well-being. Cutting-edge experiments have shown, for instance, that those who kept a gratitude journal for three weeks experienced fewer adverse physical symptoms and felt more positive and optimistic about their lives than those who recorded their daily travails or reported neutrally on the events of their lives. Moreover, those who keep a gratitude list are more likely to make progress toward important personal goals than others, according to Robert A. Emmons, a professor at UC Davis, a leading scholar of the positive psychology movement, and author of Thanks.
It should be enough for us to recognize how damaging the library cuts will be to critical library services and to people whose best hope of escaping poverty is found in libraries, but it turns out that by experiencing gratitude, Emmons says, “a person is motivated to carry out pro-social behavior, energized to sustain moral behaviors, and is inhibited from committing destructive interpersonal behvior.” Gratitude, he concludes, “serves as a moral motive.”
Late Shift: Career Reinventions
May 17, 2010
Rhonda Kave (center, above, with kids Corwin and Allison) did an exemplary truffle-shuffle, according to one of Linley Taber’s three stories on career reinvention in The New York Post (5/17/2010) which prove its never too late to land your dream job.
After a couple of decades running a beauty supply store and then working for a non-profit countering domestic violence while studying sociology, Kave finally made her sweetest move, in 2007, when her grown children moved out and she separated from her husband. Kathy Gurland pursued a series of careers before her younger sister’s cancer made her calling as a cancer treatment conusltant clear to her. And rather than retiring from 35 years of teaching English at John Jay College in New York City, 68-year-old Eric Larson has launched a new career as a renegade publisher of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Read the full package at: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/jobs/late_shift_zyj40nx1YcrymeoOtjC3zN and a Q&A with me at: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/jobs/new_agers_FXBKbEJTGJIcM4ETKHPc5I
Paulie Gee—nius’s Perfect Pizza
May 13, 2010
A passion for pizza paved the path Paulie Gee took from drudgery as a computer geek to happiness at his new pizzeria in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
I can’t deliver a slice to you, but this terrific video by Liza de Guia, at foodcurated.com, will get you salivated. And like Loretta Thayer, the piemaker I wrote about in What Should You Do With The Rest Of Your Life?, Paulie’s pursuit of perfect pizza has the purity of genius in it. Listen to him. The source of his tomatoes may be a closely-held secret, but he’s giving away the secret of success at any age. He summarizes: “I like to put my love into my pizza.”
It’s Never Too Late to Make Pizza: Paulie Gee’s from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo. ” title=“Paulie Gee—nius’s Pizza”>Paulie Gee—nius’s Pizza
GAGA Arts Festival 2010!
May 12, 2010
Betty White Has Recipe For Laughs On Saturday Night Live
May 9, 2010
” title=“Betty White on SNL”>Betty White on SNL
Of course, Betty White seems to have always known what to do with her life. On Saturday night, the 88-year-old comedienne proved her instincts—and timing—as flawless at making people laugh as ever, even for a television show that caters to people one quarter her age.
And to think, all it took for her to get her crack at hosting “Saturday Night Live” was seven decades of show business, six Emmy Awards, and a campaign on Facebook. In her day, she noted, there was, instead, the phone book, but no one would ever “waste an afternoon” on it.
She added that she had done live television early in her career, though not by choice. “People didn’t know how to tape then,” White said.
For the Mother’s Day episode, she was joined by an all-star cast of female SNL alumni, including Molly Shannon, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch and Ana Gasteyer. And none of the skits she appeared in proved too inappropriate for her, including playing an irreverent foil of a muffin mavin.
Poet Joe Enzweiler and His Cabin Door in Alaska
May 8, 2010
There are days I truly love the Internet. This morning was one of them. Searching for news from the frontiers of neuroscience, I found Joseph Enzweiler. He is a physicist-turned-poet and stone mason who remade his life in rural Alaska, rejecting a life defined by a career in favor of one defined by his attention to life.
“Time—not cash—is the treasure in life,” he recently told the alumni magazine of Xavier University. “That’s what I wanted. I understood the bargain: I gave up a career-type job so I could write poetry and live a life more in keeping with the cycles of the seasons. I’m off the grid, no plumbing, no mortgage, no bills. It’s not for everybody, but this way of life has suited me.” In a story posted on the website of the Cinncinnati Brain Tumor Center, the author of five books of poetry added his rationale: “I want my silence.”
During the summer of 2009, Joe was diagnosed and later treated for a brain tumor in his native Ohio. I’ll post the links to the excellent stories in Xavier Alumni magazine and on CBTC site below, but first I’m hoping you’ll read Joe’s poem “Cabin Door,” from his collection A Winter on Earth, published by Iris Books, and listen to him reading it during an interview with Barbara Gray @ wxvu 91.7 radio in Cinncinnati.
It is a poem of considerable beauty and depth and humanity, built with the kind of word-by-word craft with which, easy to imagine, Joe also builds his walls. I love that I can see and feel the door at the same time I can feel it opening a portal in my own brain through which I enter Joe’s life, hearing the voice of his father come back to him in the voice of the door, the door through which he passes into the physical world and back into the world of mind and memory. Its closing line contains a wish I share with the readers of What Should I Do With The Rest Of My Life?
“Cabin Door”
Friend, mute thing
I shake hands with
every day, who for
twenty-five years
let me escape
in both directions,
I remember the night
of the Coleman lamps
when I was so young
the world was all
fiberglas and plywood,
my breath an apparition
in the block of cold
that would be home.
And you, too heavy
to lift, sledded here
by moonlight, shimmered
and bolted on, felt
around the edges to seal
out the rapier wind.
As if this was my
spaceship to the stars,
emissary in a corner chair
from a world that,
as I arrive in greeting
light years hence,
is no longer there.
You watched it all,
June’s leafy sun, winter
loosening into sap and mud.
On the other side,
old loves of mine
and meals alone.
Till I stand up
one more time, put on
my coat and greet you.
Daylight floods in hinged
and white. Don’t wait
for me. Can’t promise
I’ll be back, as you
repeat what my father
told me once, from your
deepening veneer:
“I hope you find
what you’re looking for.”
Radio interview with Barbara Gray at WVXU:WXVU interview with Joe Enzweiler
Here are the links to the story from the Xavier Magazne by Greg Shaber Xavier profile Enzweiler and the Cinncinnati Brain Tumor Center Cinncinnati Brain Tumor Center - Enzweiler .
Clue: Boxing That’s Good For The Brain (answer: Crossword Puzzle)
May 5, 2010
The brain’s vitality, like an engaging crossword puzzle, depends on good connections. Conversely, the loss or weakening of connections among brain cells appears to cause most cognitive decline. So, it’s not surprising that over the last couple of years several studies have demonstrated that keeping the brain active through physical exercise and mental stimulation is key.
Three of the most compelling of those studies have shown that:
a) doing regular mental activities like crossword puzzles appears to give the brain beneficial reserves as we age
b) searching the Internet to propel curiosity and to learn new information can strengthen neural circuitry
c) doing complex, engaging tasks, such as school mentoring, for 15 hours a week, appears to reverse cognitive decline
I thought of these with a certain delight when I read Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s poem “Crossword,” in The New York Times in March. I was thrilled for several reasons beyond my friendship with her. Her poem suggests for me many of the reasons why poetry is a powerful stimulant of cell connectivity, a claim I make based on intuition and logic, with no studies in hand.
Consider that language in a good poem usually means more than one thing. Like a clue in a crossword puzzle, its literal meaning usually casts tendrils of association on entirely different branches of thought and feeling, on emotions generally more central to the poem’s meaning. A good poem causes palpable neurological leaps. It will send the brain to its own cerebral search engine, another book, or to the Internet, to deepen understanding. And, if it really grips us, will cause us to share it with others, to use it to “teach” something we have learned from it. Additionally, it will instruct us with its rhythmic or metrical pattern. But before I launch into theories of cognitive poetics, with her permission, here’s Sally and her poem.
Crossword
The white and black squares
promise order
in the morning mess
of mulling over
the latest political morass,
what’s on sale at Kohl’s,
the book review.
Each letter, shared,
which lifts away
some sheen of loneliness I
can’t quite explain.
This week, “arsenic” and “forsythia”
are joined by their i’s
like long-estranged cousins.
And when they ask
for the French equivalent of sky,
I’m back on a wooden chair
in Madame Baumlin’s
eighth-grade class, passing
a note to David, having
no idea, as my hand grazes his,
that he will drown sailing
that next summer.
I like doing the crossword
with my husband —
Source of support,
three letters.
I’m the one who guesses it,
glad he doesn’t think
of “ bra” in this way.
The puzzle rests
on the counter all week.
I like coming back,
looking at the same clue
I found insolvable
the day before, my mind
often a mystery to me,
turning corners when I sleep
or am upstairs folding clothes.
They get added to pounds.
Yesterday I thought
it had to do with money or meat;
now I can see the chain-link fence
at the local animal shelter.
Of course. “Strays.”
(Printed by permission of Sally Bliumis-Dunn. ©copyright 2010 Sally Bliumis-Dunn; all rights reserved.)
Sally teaches modern poetry at Manhattanville College and is the author of a book of poetry, Talking Underwater. A second poetry collection, Second Skin, is due out in November. She described herself to The Times as an “avid though quite mediocre” puzzle solver. Her website is: http://www.sallybliumisdunn.com/talking_underwater_sally_bliumisdunn.html