February 18, 2008
San Francisco, CA

the view from my friend Gail's back deck

It's been a good week in California. Good friends, a stunning sunset on the beach near Santa Cruz, harvesting wild mushrooms in the redwoods and cooking them up for dinner, and some lovely shows. Now I'm on a flight to Houston, then on to Memphis, where I'll be for a couple of days before driving to Florida, home for a day, then flying to North Dakota. Never bored, never appropriate clothes for the weather. I like variety, though, and I suppose it works out.

It's a fascinating time to be traveling and talking with people around the country, in the midst of what may be the most passionate political primaries in the history of the nation (based on the sheer numbers of people voting and attending political events). Walking down an airport concourse a week ago I overheard a couple talking politics and fell into their conversation, and another gentleman walking in front of us turned around and jumped in too. And there we were, four random citizens having an informed conversation about politics in a public place — because we wanted to.

I find that wonderfully encouraging, this powerful break from the public apathy. Or maybe, dare we hope, the beginning of a trend away from it. I won't spend this space to preach about Obama, though I will say that my own excitement has a lot to do with him. If you're interested, I explain why here.

The weekend before last I keynoted a retreat in Mississippi for college students, and got to have some good conversations there. This past weekend, I got to play for a peace group in Placerville, CA and hear what they've been up to. There are small groups of people doing meaningful work everywhere I go. That's worth celebrating.

And the exciting stuff isn't limited to the U.S. Last month I was back in Guatemala, checking on PEG projects there. I got to visit about half of the schools we've worked with there, and every one of them was doing well. We had a recorder concert at the CEDIN school in El Tejar that was truly amazing. I expected it to be cute, but didn't expect it to be musically impressive. I was wrong.

The concert featured multi-part music on many kinds of recorders, including piccolo recorders and bass recorders two feet tall. The kids will soon be integrating mandolin, guitar and marimba, but given that the program is only about seven months old, I'm knocked out with what they're doing already. LEAF International, an outreach project of the Lake Eden Arts Festival, partnered with PEG to do this one, and it was wonderful to see it come to fruition.

I was also there for the first day of the third year of school at the Escuelita David LaMotte, the little preschool in Tzanchaj. This year they've added first grade as well, and the schoolyear started with 60 children. A donor provided backpacks for the kids, and some notebooks, pencils and crayons to start the year with, as well as little t-shirts with the school emblem on them. The kids were beaming, and apparently I was too.

I also visited two schools that are meeting in rented spaces, but have each bought land and hope to build soon. One of them was up in the mountains in the village of San Mateo Ixtatán, and the other in Chacaya, near Lago Atitlán. PEG will be helping to fund the building projects in both places. The project in Chacaya will hopefully be funded mostly by a trans-Canadian cycling trip this coming summer. There's more, of course, but suffice to say it was a good trip. If you want to be a part of that work, you can learn more and donate at pegpartners.org.

I've put a poem up on the web site that I've been doing in shows lately. Several folks have asked if they could get a copy of it, and I've made that available here. There's also a recording of it (called White Flour) here.