I’ve been reading a bunch during the holiday mini-break. I just finished one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. If you are interested in globalization, South America, Bolivia, NGOs, environmentalism, indigenous rights or politics, I highly recommend “Whispering in the Giant’s Ear.” Written by William Powers, this is a nonfiction tale of a nonprofit worker’s experience in Bolivia during recent and on-going political turmoil. His perspective is so completely different from mine, and considering I’m a nonprofit worker whose passport has more than one Bolivian stamp, I truly enjoyed his writing.
One scene, where he is out in the middle of the Amazon with a group of indigenous coworkers when their truck gets stuck in the mud. Everyone but the writer knows that bees will find them within a few minutes. Thousands of bees. They need to get the truck unstuck pronto. He writes about this scene with such clarity and humor:
“Gaspar now changes tack. He puts a tiny hand on my shoulder and says, “You are a bee.”
I momentarily forget the pain of my stings and look down at Gaspar’s slight, finely wrought face. He continues “Just relax. If you don’t get nervous, no pasa nada.” By tensing up, he explains, I was going against the “bee energy” and causing them to react against me. I needed to go with the flow.
With fresh resolve, I turn and walk back toward the dreaded pickup. As the buzzing sounds builds, I repeat to myself, “You are a bee. You are a bee.” I slide into the front seat, remarkably calm, repeating my mantra and gently shooing a bee… They perch on my eyelashes and eyebrows, burrow in my hair, explore my leg hairs. You are a bee. I was a bee! Not a single sting and their little legs, which had felt so creepy-crawly, are now just a light tickle. That they are not stinging further builds my confidence. I am fully relaxed, the communal buzz a gigantic om.
At other times his words simply struck a cord and I found myself dog-earing page after page, hoping the library wouldn’t mind.
My parents’ asceticism, including a strict TV protocol, inoculated me from consumerism more than many of my peers, but I am far from immune. There’s the Gap, its doors revolving, consumer in, consumer out, and I hesitate. Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell warned us in 1976 , our bicentennial year, about “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” arguing that while capitalism hinges on such virtues as asceticism, thrift and self-denial, it produces social surpluses that lead to luxury, deepened materialism, nurture acquisitiveness, and turn self-indulgence into a birthright. Tocqueville too predicted that self-centeredness and egotism would be “democracy’s temptation.”
Four out of five bananas, absoloodle.
For brain candy, I’m now inhaling “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” which couldn’t be more appropriate to read with this week’s news of Bhutto’s murder. It is about women in Afghanistan and how completely and totally crazy life is under their changing politics in the last 30 years. Khaled Hosseini had me at “Kite Runner,” but he may have just made me a fanatic. So far, four out of five bananas. {And I don’t just through those bananas around mamsy pansy.}
If you are looking for a great movie, see Juno. Loved it. An interesting, exceptionally violent and mildly confusing movie? No Country for Old Men. I’ve got to find the book now, the film bothered me so. This weekend I hope to see Kite Runner and I am Legend.
The television writers may be on strike, but I’m not crying. Instead, I’m curled up with a cup of tea and a new quilt, without a to do list, happily enjoying cleaning up the neglected book shelves in my studio and watching the dust gather on my television.
~Kelli