A big thank you to Terces and Matthew from all of us!  Thank you for being fierce love warriors, for always being a space of love, and for listening with compassion for all of us.  Thank you for always seeming to get bigger!  Thank you for holding the space for dialogue and giving us the opportunity to share our amazing organic food and love!!!

It isn’t every day that you hear great music with a real message.  I mean, not everyone is John Lennon or Bob Marley – right? 

That’s what I thought, but I had to think again when Erin Ross introduced me to Luminaries, a Venice based consciousness-expanding Hip Hop group whose history as teachers, social workers, activists, MCs, and instruments of service informs their music and their message.  These are not just incredible musicians, but messengers of hope, whose song titles on their debut album, “One,” read like a list of mantras: “Everything is One,” “Only Love,” “Show the World,” “Peace” and “Be the Change.”

The Occupy San Francisco encampment was receiving so many food donations last week, they had to turn generous people away. Across the nation companies, organizations and individuals have shown their support for the Occupy movement by contributing supplies to the camps of people who now occupy public zones in reportedly more than 1,000 U.S. cities. These citizens are not merely erecting tents and staying the night, however: there is incredible organization going into the demonstrations. Many encampments have their own first aid tents, communications areas, and, of course, food tables. All the effort going into creating these temporary mini-cities reveals how popular the movement has become in the month it’s been active.

How did Occupy Wall Street begin?

The Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters first proposed the idea of occupying the New York financial district in late summer of this year, circulating a poster showing a dancer atop the Wall Street bull and posing the question, What is Our One Demand? Since the protests began September 17, many demands have emerged, including ending corporate personhood, raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, shrinking the income gap between rich and poor, and reforming campaign finance laws. With its strident and raucous anti-capitalism stance, we could have expected Adbusters to launch a fringe movement that would fail to capture the hearts of a majority of citizens; however, widespread anger at the state of the economy and exploitation by corporate power have caused the movement to move towards the mainstream. Time magazine, for example, recently reported that 54% of Americans approve of Occupy.

Where does Cafe Gratitude fit into all of this excitement? Well, if you haven’t heard, our LA location just trucked a big batch of Grateful Bowls over to Occupy Los Angeles to feed the people camping outside City Hall (see the video below!). Ryland Engelhart, general manager at Gratitude LA, explained that he sees the Occupy movement as a call for unification from people across the country. Americans are feeling separated from each other and from our institutions, he says, and this may be a chance to bring us all together to improve our society. Luckily, the tent village in the City of Angels was still in need of food, so Ryland was not turned away and protesters got to enjoy delicious organic vegan meals!

We can connect food to the Occupy movement in more ways than simply feeding the demonstrators, however. A great article in Mother Jones has just been published, illustrating how the financial industry is not the only economic behemoth that has been consolidating power and causing angst for the majority of Americans. The food industry, the article claims, is even more consolidated and monopolistic than the financial sector. For example, just four companies produced 75 percent of cereal and snacks, 60 percent of cookies, and half of all ice cream in the U.S. in 2002. And since then, not much has changed, although the food movement is gaining steam, and will ramp up its power this October 24, the first-ever National Food Day.

Here’s hoping that the people on the streets keeping eating well, and that we can all start understanding that we’re going to need a movement as powerful as Occupy Wall Street to reform our current food system!

In the Abounding River Logbook, one of the six currents is creation. We say that active creativity is essential to achieving abundance. We must both actively create things in the world, and actively see and create a vision of abundance.  I access creativity through taking personal responsibility. I take responsibility for how I’m acting, what I’m producing, but also what I am actively creating and envisioning. I take responsibility for my vision of the world, and recognize that I can not only create a new vision, but recognize that I have been actively creating my vision of the world all along.

I created a design that was six years in the making that I made become my vision of the world. Out of my education and work in social justice, I envisioned an invasive tree that took too much from the soil. The tree represented the power structures and oppressive systems I wasn’t committed to. In my design (see second image) I created a tearing up of the tree through various metaphorical imagery (vines tugging down the branches, something rotting away the roots… branches being cut off). All of these metaphors I lived by- on how to deconstruct the tree that I saw as being damaging to the overall environment.

And deconstruction is how my life looked for 6 years. I used criticism against everything without much idea for how to instill hope or rebirth after the death of the system. I used various methods of social change to address problems that I saw, and constantly came across seeing that I was never bringing answers or solutions to them. My experience of the world was through that vision that I was actively creating and recreating.      Two weeks ago I really noticed that my tree metaphor wasn’t working for me to create hope. So I set off to find a new image, a rebirth of the tree, or something that I was committed to. I created the image above, the conclusion of the oppressive tree, and a new habitat for a rebirth. In my vision, the roots have been torn away to where all is left is love. Rooted in love, a new sprout is born and there is pure possibility.

As a means to re-train myself in my new vision, I’m taking on the 365 day challenge. Every day for the next year I am creating a piece of art with this new image. Every day through this creativity I am actively creating hope in the world by transforming my vision and by physically expressing my vision to others. I am day by day re-inscribing a new belief through my repeated creations.

The Idea for the practice of 365 projects came from Noah Scalin, who took on creating one image every day with a different medium himself, and then created a journal to encourage others. Check out the book here; check out some of the variations of my design here.              This week I invite you to look at what belief you have that’s causing you suffering. Taking responsibility for it as your creation and not truth is empowering. What can you actively create in its place? What belief can you adopt that serves you and serves the planet? We say that a belief is a thought practiced over and over again. What new thought can you begin with today?

One weekday morning as I biked from my house to the BART station to commute to work in San Francisco, I saw a man jogging on the path ahead of me. He was dressed in business attire and carried a brief case in his left hand. A man in business clothes jogging? Maybe he was running a little late to catch his train. Or maybe he was just trying to get a little exercise while on his way to work. My mind makes up all sorts of stories about people I see. What really caught my attention, however, was what he held in his right hand. It was a long white cane, and he was sweeping it ahead of him, feeling for the grass at the edge of the paved path. He was blind, or at least visually-impaired. I was filled with awe, and I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped. I did my usual call-out, "Bike on your left," and passed him carefully, all the while incredulous at his courage and fearlessness.

We all have fears about all sorts of things in life: fear of intimacy, fear of being hurt, fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of death. I bet this man has those kinds of fears too. He's human, after all. But what impressed me is that he clearly seemed to have conquered a pretty basic fear of mine: the fear of pushing through the discomfort and doing whatever it takes to move forward in life – to move toward a more improved or evolved version of myself. The way I see it, he probably leaves that fear behind every time he picks up his cane and walks, let alone jogs.

I still think of that man and wonder what it's going to take for me to really let go of my fears – or simply push through them. Perhaps I can learn from him to pick up my cane and run.

Valentina came from Germany finding us through  Jason Mraz and attended our weekend workshop. Valentina's enthusiasm for life and genuine courage and openness inspired us all and we urged her to talk about her experience through our blog.  Meet Valentina:  a beautiful shining spirit causing her life in Germany.

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