Liberation, Theology, Democracy, and Abolitionism: Shared History US/Ireland

The Irish history is very rich. Ireland and the United States share hudreds of years of history together.

I am particularly impresed by learning here of the depth to which our histories are shared. Between Ireland and the Americas there are so many ways in which we nurtured democracy, decency, theology of humanism and liberation. We have literally grown up together.

Everywhere we go in Dublin, we find information about the struggle for human rights here. More often than not we can find ties between Ireland and the United States. Whether it is a history of our early great civil rights leaders (from Frederick Douglass's visit to Ireland or the importance of O'Connell to American abolitionists.

We are in Ireland. In this lovely city, Dublin, one is surrounded by rich histories of writers and revolution. Yet, somehow, it is a city of long-endearing oppression, repression, and human degradation.

What can be said about our mirror societies? What lessons can be learned about the benefits we have to give the world from our suffering? What can we do to prove a viable and gentler future is near? Both countries have important roles in development of our modern ideas on human liberation, theology, democracy, and abolitionism (equality). Yet, we suffer much injustice and inequity.

After a very short visit to Ireland, it is clear to me that our solutions are very close indeed.

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We found solutions for our world problems

We are not completely finished.

We are excited to return home. We have learned a lot.

The most important thing we may have learned is something which we have been struggling the whole trip to give back to the planet - We have found a solution for our world's problems.

The solution is this: All the major problems (or opportunities) which our planet and humanity is consumed with already have solutions. The solution is us (it began a long time ago).

Further, we know what these 'opportunity solutions' are. In fact, we agree on what they are. And, we agree overwhelmingly. We have been finding difficulty discussing our solutions together. What we do not yet understand how to do is to manifest the solutions and put them into practice.

How we are able to turn our agreements into actions is another description of human dilemma.

For sometime on this sojourn, we became convinced that those marketing and selling to the world must be put in charge of convincing and recruiting mass participation. This plan has many flaws. Most of the flaws are human. Human solutions, however, are necessary.

For most of this trip, we have had discussions which would end here. The problems are human caused, owned, and proliferated. Because our human condition is such, and we are not evolving from self-centered behaviors, human solutions are impossible. We grasp at straws....

Let me tell you again, we have found a solution for our world's problems. Yet, we have learned this also in our short sojourn - between just a few countries and over very little of the world's territory the solutions grow smaller, less complex, more agreeable.

We are thought farmers. We plant and nurture and spread the thoughts which we harvest across the planet. But, there was no need to travel to do this; once we left our closed fenced domain of assumptions we were able to accept them all around us.

Here are some principles we agree on as humans, universally and by vast democratic majority:

a.) Saving the world is more important than individual self interests.
b.) Community benefits from safety, culture, local and regional collaboration.
c.) Communication is convergence of agreement by education and facilitation.
d.) It is hard to get along but we must.
e.) People want to live by community quality standards of health and welfare.
f.) People want education and improvement increases for future generations.
g.) Humans, plants, and animals all benefit from ecological stewardship.

Please add those which you are aware of.

Once you apply your own community and individual versions of these to your own possibility of a miracle (or simply existence through participation) you are building actions to embrace out future opportunity and securing more pleasant, dynamic, equitable and artistic futures.

We have found a solution for our world's problems - but we want to know yours.

We are not completely finished. We have a few days left before we land at John F Kennedy. JFK, as the airport is commonly referred to, is where our round-the world journey began nine months back. But, we return as ambassadors to our own country - with solutions for our world's problems.

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London, Edinburgh, and Dublin are FREE

Oh what a delight it is to realize one's worry and travel expectations rise to frenetic and paranoid levels only to be relieved to discover the opposite is true: London, Edinburgh, and Dublin are FREE!! We spent months worrying about our time in Europe. A friend, Andy H., had smartly told us that we had a great beginning to our itinerary, 'You are smart to begin with Tokyo, Shanghai, China and Hong Hong,' he said, because if you start with the more expensive countries it makes it much easier to enjoy your travel. Everything seems to always get cheaper.'

While it is true that after India, entering Africa, the prices started to tick up; the transition from Ethiopia, to Ghana/Togo, and then Egypt was acceptable, a mild expenditure curve. The curve got steeper traveling from Turkey through the Balkans into Europe (however, we had a brief but very scary insight in Greek southern Cyprus - and thus were prepared. Again, between Italy, France, Spain and Morocco the prices seemed to by consistently high and arbitrarily excessive at times. But, as our readers know from previous blogs, we found wonderfully inexpensive ways to thoroughly enjoy such exquisitely costly locales as Barcelona and Paris. Thus we had a sense of confidence crossing the channel.

London (the British Pound) is quite expensive. But, all of its National Museums are free. I cannot begin to cover all the other great aspects of London which are free but save it to say that between very reasonable theater tickets, the Oyster Card transfer option on buses (maximum £3.50 per day usage charge), the Globe Shakespeare Theater and the numerous local performing acts daily across the city; there is no reason to avoid London because of costs.

It is expensive to buy food, and even more expensive to eat out. If you make friends, use social networking (sites like couchsurfing.com or hospitality club are great for finding hosts really interested in meeting travelers - or if you find camping or cheap hostels), once you get past the daily costs of housing the rest can be very same, close to home. We will definitely consider house-swaps the next time we visit Europe so that we can both stay in one place a while and share our own empty place back home with someone who can enjoy it (and water the plants).

We have written numerous times about how our best experiences of nine months of world travel are those that are free (friendships, public space, sharing meals, and attending public museums, libraries, parks, graveyards and the like always bring us heightened joy). There is a corollary side effect to this philosophy - when people are not paying for activities they take them more lightly. People want to get there money's worth even if they are disinterested! Those who are paying for special exhibits in museums, for example, try and nurse every minute out of the painting and clog the view points (we saw a Turner exhibit at the Prado that was hard top enjoy - whereas the whole Turner wing at the Tate Britain in London was nearly looked over by passersby.

Dublin, like Edinburgh and London just before it, for us has been an utter delight because we wander in and out of public space, museums, libraries, graveyards and the like unencumbered. There is a nice flow. IT is not so crowded as London. Certainly not nearly as crowded as Edinburgh during its myriad of simultaneous festivals happening in August (Fringe, International, Literature, and Tattoo just to name a few). Some of our own favorite finds here have been the campus of Trinity College, the Pub near us in continuous service from 998, Glasnevin graveyard (a graveyard containing many dead including over 1 million plague victims, the museum is modern and disneyesque - to be skipped) and Chester Beatty Library next to Dublin Castle. The Beatty library is easily one of the best overviews for understanding the worlds major religions that we have come across in nine months.

Both of us felt that if our round-the-world adventure through lands of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Dadaism, Maoism, Jainism, Confucianism and more had been informed early on the trip by this museum it would have been a lot easier to feel that we had some fundamental understanding both of the culture and the morays. Dadaism and Maoism I added. Just wanted to see if you were paying attention. In the graveyard there are much more simplistic examples of the world's religions including Scientology and humanism but I find Dadaism and Maoism just as poignant.

We entered Dublin knowing it's rated by travelers as Europe's most expensive city. Having passed through Monaco, Nice, Venice this seemed really scary. It's as expensive as you make it.

Enjoy Dublin, it is almost free.

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Poem for a Scottish Walk (for Doug)

Do we remember

Or is this walk

The very same one?

Almost flat

Rotunded

Hume's land

Heaves

Gently

It eases up

Onto

Short hills

Over

Summits

To Troll

On forever

We visited

In between

Thinning

Skies

Woven

By Ariadne

String

That pull

Gently

On green

Marsh

Meadows

We felt

Hot-cold

Drops of carmel

Sunlight

Breezes

Burnt on lengths

of hair

Roughied

Against

Our necks

Our walk

This happened

At the sum

Of another

Unnamed knoll

Cloaked

in Pink

Firebrush

The land

Beaconed

In blue

Insistence

Weighed in

Thoughts

From rambling

Last year's

Water

Me, pulling on

Clotted heels

Hefted

By many

Centuries

Weight

From soggied

Peat fields

Filled with

Vanished

Bones

Of captured

Souls

The grounds

Greener

The shades

Blacker

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The Internet is Ubiquitous – or was that a glitch?

Microsoft is corrupted.

For the third time on our nine month journey, our computer is dead. On a blue screen it screams, “your computer has been corrupted – please restart in ‘Safe Mode’”. Travel with a computer has become, for us, common place.

We left New Orleans in early December with a less than one kilo netbook. It has performed flawlessly and been heavily abused. It’s one drawback, though, is that it keeps allowing Microsoft to corrupt it. When corruption occurs, I think of it as the computer’s gone for vacation. The computer is still there. Its office space is occupied. But when you try to contact it you get this passive blue screen – a sort of ‘I will be out of the office until September 2nd – please try and contact me when I return,’ type message.

So, our computer is corrupted. Thinking about our current computer problem leads us to feeling that we are letting down our blog. We love our blog. It is a part of our promise of service and exchange between home and abroad. We have a dedicated group of readers to whom we are very grateful. Our readers give us a sense of mission, engagement beyond our common surrounds, contact with home, and exchange. We do not mean to let you down.

When at first the computer goes on vacation, we enter into a revolving conversation. I always defend the internet. When we were in developing countries I would throw up my hands, “Let’s just give away the computer here and be done with it.” My latest response in Bretagne, France was different, “We are close enough to home; let’s just carry it around broken until we get back.” I look at computers as apparati of planned obsolescence. Computers are disposable. They are meant to be treated this way. I don’t like it. I don’t appreciate it. But, it is a fact.

My wife, coblogger, and traveling companion has a much younger and healthier opinion and usefulness for a broken down compute;. “It is not the computer that is malfunctioning; it is Microsoft,” she will tell me. All we need is a reasonable techie in an internet café and we can reinstall Windows. A simple fix. Of course, she is right.

We have had our computer put back together from Mumbai to rural Turkey. Our computer has recovered from two previous complete meltdown, several close calls, Chinese worms, spyware invaders, reckless luggage handlers, overnight bus rides under foot and much worse… So, it seems obvious enough that now that we are back in the West; now that we are back in the birthplace of western civilization; now that we are in the country of all things cosmopolitan and worthwhile for consumption (France); it would be easy for us to find techies and internet. In Mumbai, when the precious blogs on our ‘desktop’ had not been properly backed up to the hard drive, our lovely techie buddies did the equivalent of open heart triple bypass surgery to our computer. Not really being surgeons; but having our full faith; they got their 10 minute surgery education from YouTube. The surgeons downloaded a video of cutting apart and putting back together our exact victim and then for the course of two hours played Dr Jeckyl and gave rebirth to our traveling Mr Hyde.

This of course brings me to our point: We need the internet to publish. We need the internet to travel (our itineraries, maps, contacts etc reside in email or other forms). So it is important that the internet remains ubiquitous. It does not.

When the internet quits working our Marco Polo lifestyle collapses. For those of us who begin travel from a computer savvy country, we may have to accept changes in our technological world view. At the beginning of our trip I imagined the world was broken into two classes of internet use.

My internet worldview was developed between my experiences in the United States and Latin America. I believed that there was either a culture of computers (with wifi flowing freely from every house and business), or, there were internet cafes in every neighborhood where single available twentysomethings teenage facebook fans, tiny video game addicts, and midlife male losers met like a small community to laugh about or hide behind computer terminals under whirling fans. I believed that the internet was ubiquitous. As it turns out, internet and computer culture changes as dramatically from country to country as language. In what I thought would be the most computer savvy countries t visit (China and Japan where computers are pioneered and built) there was not the public I.T. culture I had assumed.

Early readers may remember us bemoaning the ‘Great Firewall of China’ which kept us blocked from such important web communities as Facebook, Google, and YouTube. In Ethiopia, internet had really only arrived in the capital (Addis Ababa); the rest of the country waited for periodic signals and power to be turned back on. In Ghana and West Africa, there was internet as I had known it in South America, existing in small internet cafes. However, they were so completely local we needed guides to find them.

Each country, it turns out, has a unique relationship to computers. In Turkey, wifi was everywhere. However, the country was struck by some great paranoia (so that while wifi comes streaming from every possible nook and cranny, none of it was accessible). A grand conspiracy to sneak in and destroy your computer, your home life, and probably your fridge and TV caused streaming paranoia. In three weeks in Turkey, we never came across an open wifi signal. In Europe, there appears to be internet. I think people are using computers. But it is not a public thing.

In Paris, Madrid, or Venice, the great café culture has not been upended into becoming the great internet café culture; people leave their laptops at home and still enjoy old fashioned conversation.

As for our blog, we are going to work hard to find internet. If we can find a sprightly twenty-something techie we will beg them to help us reinstall our windows and return our tiny netbook from its extended vacation. Until then, we will seek out internet hotspots and wifi cafes, borrow beg and steal our friends and others computers, and publish, where ever possible, our blogs.

Our computer is corrupted. This means, you can expect fewer blog postings for a while.

The Internet is Ubiquitous – or was that a glitch?

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Gone to Edinburgh

We have left to Edinburgh. It is a round trip of sorts, even as neither of us have ever been there.

Our families are from there; but, they hardly mentioned it to us.

In a sense, we are discovering Scotland as most Americans would be likely to do... as a vague department of the ambiguously and synonymously named UK.

But, that would be insulting to the Edinburgherishianese- who, unfortuantely, do not have the best weather or recent liberation histories; but, who apparently do have the distinction of the sexiest accent in the British Isles.

At any rate, Edinburgh and the people of Scotland can take pride that they have produced some very bright lights in the history of western thought.

So we go there as American shadows of Scotland past. Who knows what we will turn up.

It takes a cartographer and a philosopher to bring us to this point. We were not nearly the broad minded aesthetes nor such capable ambassadors before our honey service year began. Yet, we go their cap in hand, ready to give thanks for our ancestors hard won successes, their confidence, their willingness to travel intellectually and physically and be in new places. It is our final effort at discovering the places we have always known yet never been.

When we get home, I have promised my bride a dinner at the Windsor Court. She, in turn, has offered me a steamy blue weekend in her adopted hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi.

We still have no technological device from which to edit and post our blogs.

Please stay posted. Our journey together just began.

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Arctic Perspective: Canada House, London

Outside of the British Museum on bustling Trafalgar Square sits on innocuous, slightly smaller building called Canada House. Sitting there on the square, the first thing that draws a visitor's eye to the building are the Canadian flags flying on the rooftop. A sane person visiting any of the more popular destinations lining this historic square, in particular the Brit's museum and it's lovey Portrait Gallery or the corner behind it, will want a bit of respite. As travel bloggers, it is incumbent for us to tell you about the very special Canada House.
Our first trip to the British Museum, we were already tired. We walked in and walked out. Getting into the door was just too crowded. We had been two hours walking, but we loved the activity happening on the square outside. We sat there wondering what this exhibit and building were that was advertising "Arctic Perspective."

Arctic Perspective was a wonderful blend of indigenous Inuit artists, sculptures, printmaking, painters, and blends that with scientific research and engineering related to the future of Arctic Exploration. Its more important focus was that it highlighted the ecological, cultural, and geopolitical importance of the Arctic in the context of its indigenous cultures. It is a living project. It has an auspicious goal. It is something which can be documented and followed beyond its short tenure at this small London government institution of Canada. It aims to promote and sustain that which it exhibits and displays. Arctic Perspective is working in collaboration with the people pf Igloolik, Kinngait, Iqaluit, Mittmatalik, and Kanngigtugaapik in Nunavut, Canada and with other arctic communities, artists, architects on devising 'mobile media' and 'living units and infrastructure' portable buildings which can be used across the arctic for creative media production while being powered by renewable resources. It is a big project. It has teachable standards. The project will go on indefinitely as the Arts Catalyst seeks to provide a nurturing and sustainable home for part of Canada's national identity.


Canada House, Trafalgar Square, London
Canada House and other reasons to find places of respite and refuge in cities

When I first got my travel bug as a young adult I tried to find the end of the road and found several of them wound up in Alaska. To get there, we drove through Canada and learned about the ruggedness of the Arctic. It has always remained an important memory for me. Today we were two or three hours walking inside the big museum across the street from little Canada House. So, when our search for floor '0' ended in a wing with no connections to Michael Angelo, we exited back onto the street and popped out in front of the waving maple leaves and welcoming exposition signs.

There are other reasons to visit Canada House, it is a wonderful nicely decorated period building, you can get lots of information, you can arrange Visas; but, our favorite attribute which I am trying to embed deep enough within this blog not to overrun them with cheapskate backpackers - is that they have a lobby with really great computers which can be used to check internet and even print documents f_ee!!).

Scattered throughout downtown London and in its surrounds there are many such places of respite. We have passed Zimbabwe and Korea's welcoming centers and not gone in them. But, my guess, is like most of the cultural attractions and visitor centers around the world, not only will they have great inviting literature, but often they will have some exhibit or special introduction to their country.

London is of course filled with so many examples of where one turn down and underused alley or behind an ivy gate can bring you to lovely points of solace. All along the Thames are underutilized but much appreciated and cared for gardens where you are more likely to see street repairman having lunch or business types having a smoke, than see any roving bands of tourist groups or the like. Deacon's Square tucked behind the Westminster Abbey is the perfect place to quietly reflect on what the town might have sounded and acted like one or two hundred years previously.

Everywhere we go we continue to discover places which we want to share. Remembering to blog about them in time is hard for us. So we will have to come back soon, bog from the Americas and continue to refine our ever expanding interests in both going local and finding the hidden gems which are placed all around us.

Stay tuned, we cross England next to Scotland and then taste the Isle of Ireland before we fly across that big Atlantic pond back to our homelands.

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A Grafitti Park grows in Stockwell

Neither Stockwell nor Brixton have historically been viewed by mainstream observers as the fountains of aesthetics.

You do not learn about Brixton at the Academy. however, those of us interested in contemporary art or modern urban history are likely to find ourselves in stranger places. London, to world travelers, may seem tame in its roughest edges. Art, however, is not tame here. Projects are being developed. One which grabbed my eye way the Signal Project.

While Stockwell and Brixton have always been contemporary and artistic in the heaps on aesthetics they shed upon the modern cosmopolitan mind of London, I am not a scholar of English urban history. What I do is blog, blogging, and walking or some combination in between. And when I have time to pause, I pick up the local free papers, the local art papers, or a wifi/internet signal and research what I can turn up.

This blog turned up from the Thursday edition of the Evening Standard on graffiti gardening.

It is a terrific story (which you can link to above). Public art, 'spray can art' or outsider neo-art is what some of us think of as a new revolutionary spirit. It is embraced, disgraceful, misunderstood. It is highly debatable. It is a challenge to get a hold on whether you have read Banksy or prefer to simpy accept mottos. Solo's motto is often painted on the walls of the ball courts of stockwell and Brixton, "Say Something Beautiful or Be Quiet." I have said something similar in my revious blogs on the subject. Graffit can be damaging and offensive without purpose, or without even meaning to not have purpose. It can be venally vain.

It can also be a powerful movement for uplifting rises of power in marginalized communities. It sometimes can say what we have thought but not heard. It can replace and undermine the worlds of consumerism, advertising, and corporations. It is powerful. It cannot be turned off.

Like the arts and sciences this public art incorporates, is incorporated, shares and crosses boundaries with what it means to be human, social, cultural, individual. It can be as simple as the biases we already have, graffiti belongs with rap, breakdance, basketball, being black. It can be as ritzy and accepted by art forums as Banksy's wonderful book Wall and Piece.

London is not so shallow. It is multi-cultural (probably the multicultural capital of Europe).

Solo-one, the hero of our insider article, sees graffiti as feeding young people with positive ideas. "You have to have the heart to do it..." he says, tagging as opposed to art can, bring neighborhoods to the brink of "descending into madness." Art and the ability to pursue the skills of being an artist and perfecting the artistic craft is an agreed upon ethic that crosses generations of street artists whether they are well known or invisible. "If it is good, the walls are better off plain." Solo-One says, "Sacrifice is important. If a piece has only taken 20 minutes I know the artist's heart wasn't in it."

What is the difference really between the honing of artistic craft today and the construction of great murals, mosaics, and other public art pieces of the past?

In today's London, some of the best, most loved contemporary art can be found in the outdoors. Galleries are tucked between forgotten streets and along abandoned industry and rail yards. There are galleries tucked into the vacant spaces (read: parks) in Stockwell Park Estates. This is the domain of Solo-One and his kindred spirits. "This is a safe-place for kids to learn how to paint," he says, and to understand the commitment it takes to be a good writer."

Today we are off to the Meeting of Styles, it is an important part of our trip to London. We will try and guide ourselves to finding a Banksy tour beginning Waterloo underneath the railway arches... that is all we have right now to work with. Art it seems is never far nor hard to find.

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