Talking to the cemetary groundskeeper in el centro, It hit home just how over-politicized immigration has become. It is what politicians and pundits call a "wedge issue".

At one point he said "they're not bad people. They just want to work." and then "no offense, but you don't see white people in the fields picking crops. They don't want those jobs."   Read more...

I'm up early this morning in El Centro. We drove here last night from Tijuana. The rest of our time in Tijuana was profound.

I met a young man who was in the sick room at the Casa del Migrante. His name is Roman Tlapa Ortiz. He's 22 years old and will likely never walk properly again. He had originally crossed the border into the US when he was 16 years old to work in Los Angeles as a metal worker. He made $12/hour working 40 hours a week and sent most of that money home to his family. In Mexico, the same kind of labor would pay him anywhere between $5-15 a day.   Read more...

We made it Tijuana yesterday and spent the end of the day at the beach, talking with people who were preparing to cross the border and taking photos of the place where the US-Mexico border enters the water. It was amazing to talk with this one man who was waiting for night to fall before he and his wife tried to cross along the beach. She is 6 months pregnant and they have 3 other children who were born and live in the US who they were trying to rejoin after having been deported. The openness of the people we spoke to was wonderful. They felt it was important to simply tell their stories and it felt good to receive them with open minds.   Read more...

Rupa & the April Fishes is a San Francisco-based, folk rock/latin fusion band described as "slinky, fevered, hypnotic and intoxicating." Recently, they've begun a socio-musical tour along the US Mexico border, from Tijuana to Texas and beyond. The tour, "Por La Frontera," will include an across-the-border concert, with half the band playing in Tijuana and half in San Diego. Each concert in the tour will be a multi-media event that combines music with video projections created by documentary photographer Lars Howlett.   Read more...

In my childhood home, we had two items that my mother put on display every spring. They were a pair of trees. The stems were made of twisted silver fibers, while the blossoms were of transparent pink glass. The light shimmering through those weeping branches created an aura of mystery and magical beauty. My mother explained they came from far away Japan, which made them all the more special for us small-town children in that era before Internet and easy world travel.

Years later, I ended up living in that Far Eastern culture, whose seeds had been planted in my psyche at such an early age. And every spring when I see the gracious weeping cherries here, I remember my family’s lovely glass trees.   Read more...

Do you read the ezine Greater Good? The issue that arrived in my inbox last week had two titles that intrigued me: “Why is there Peace?” and “You talkin’ to me?” Of course, I eagerly clicked on things till the first article came up. My reading slowed as I understood the topic. Same for the second article. Why?

Because they were both about nonviolence.   Read more...

Is Love truly a rapture that transforms the very core of one’s being? Is it as deep, transcendent and incredible, as the writers and poets would have us believe?

The question of "what is love?" has put the imaginations of the greatest poets and philosophers in a spin for more than two thousand years and they are still groping for a definite answer… Love, if you ask me, is fundamentally unknowable. The greatest mystery of humankind. Elusive. Hard to define and confine.   Read more...

In 2004, a friend gave me the debut album of the English guitar rock band, Razorlight. I was immediately struck by the energy of the music. Enthusiastic music, every song getting to a wild climax. 3 years later, they released their second album and this time the music press caught them and wrote them up to the sky. They became very popular and played all over the world in ten-thousand-people halls. A promising future ahead of 4 young musicians. Now, 5 years later, the press has dropped them already, (they found new heroes) and Razorlight does not even sell out the 1,000-person venue where I am watching them tonight.

But still… their music is full of energy, the musicians play like every song is their last song, like the have to give all their energy. The crowd hardly moves, the audience doesn’t sing the songs along like they did 2 years ago, but still… they are playing like this could be their last contribution to the world.   Read more...

I loved this photograph I found on a blog called One Million Peace Signs. The commentary asks, “Who’s peacing who?” Reflections of peace in two mirrors, and one of the reflectors is also the photographer!

Peace, my friend, often requires reflection, a luxury for many of us whose lives are too scheduled to make time for such an activity of Being, not doing.   Read more...

Alec, the online intern at Ode, posed this question to me a few weeks ago when we stopped by for a lunch-hour hello and some awesome eats with the rest of the amazing gang at Ode in Mill Valley!

Alec’s question is one Steph and I get asked a lot in our presentations, a lot like some of the honest questions from our pint-sized eco warriors, the elementary school kids! Since they're curious about the run's details, they ask “where do you guys sleep” or, “where do you go to the bathroom?” I love the straight-shooting questions of an 8 year old. We also get asked, how long do we run each day, how much food do we eat and our personal favorite, how many days did it take to get ready for the biggest journey of our lives, thus far?   Read more...