It’s been one of those times when the pace of events — both interior and exterior — accelerates almost beyond reckoning. Granted, these days I get much of my news from “The Daily Show,” but still: Inauguration! Republican vote-rigging! Somalia! Egypt! I had a birthday with all the attendant thrill and agony, met a bunch of deadlines, and – big news for me – finished my book revisions and sent manuscripts to the kind people who agreed to read them and consider blurbing. (You’ll be hearing more about these spring releases very soon.)

My blog philosophy is to wait till I have something to say rather than adhering to a preset schedule. Usually I have something to say once a week or so, but I couldn’t rouse myself to add to the tidal wave of words engulfing the blogosphere this month. Mostly my reasons have been personal. I’ve been at that familiar stage for a writer: the writing is done. I think it’s good (and response from early readers suggests that I could be right). But that doesn’t mean everyone else will think so. Once again, I find myself putting forward ideas that are sure to gore someone’s sacred ox. Once again, I have granted myself the freedom to mix categories, cross boundaries, suggest possibilities that not everyone may welcome. I took some heart from Nassim Taleb’s point in Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder that writers can be antifragile to criticism: “[I]f you really want people to read a book, tell them it is ‘overrated,’” he writes, “with a sense of outrage.” Of course, I hope everyone loves my new work, but whatever may come, I’m almost ready to say, “Bring it on.”

All this hope, anticipation, and effort is a little decentering, though. As always, my antidote is music. The last few weeks I’ve been listening obsessively to Roy Buchanan, infusing my system with Vitamin G (that’s for guitar), drinking in music’s magical powers to activate body, mind, heart, and soul. So if you’re a little glad to see me back in the blogosphere, thank Roy. I do.

“Muslims and non-Muslims should realize that we all are just travelers in this temporary world,” photojournalist Sadaf Syed tells me. She adds that we all should act on this realization “by opening up and getting to learn about each others faith, cultures, tradition.”

Photographer Sadaf Syed pays respect to the victims of 9/11 at Ground Zero in New York City.

Since she was two months old, Syed has traveled throughout the United States with her family, exposed to different cultures, religions, and people, including Muslims of different ethnicities. After picking up on many different customs and traditions, Syed became inspired to tell stories about this diverse group of Muslims.

Syed began her photography career with wedding photography and portraiture. Years later, her career shifted to amplifying the voices of people whose stories are seldom heard, giving them the chance to share their journeys, emotions, hopes, fears, abilities, and disabilities. As a visual storyteller, Syed is always looking for ways to inspire and educate people through her photography.

“You’re not a storyteller in words and writing, but you’re a storyteller visually, so you’re always looking to stimulate people visually,” she says.

In 2010, Syed, a Pakistani-Muslim, self-published iCOVER: A Day in the Life of a Muslim-American COVERed Girl, a book about Muslim women breaking stereotypes across the globe. The book features page after page of everyday Muslim women of different ethnicities and backgrounds, presenting photographs of them alongside captivating captions, quotes, and stories.

Coming across some good news I wanted to share it and that made me think of reason number one, which you may have missed when it happened long ago:

1. Reasons To Be Cheerful, Pt 3, by Ian Dury. Great back-up band. Hone your cockney by catching the words. Here are some of them:

A bit of grin and bear it, a bit of come and share it
You’re welcome, we can spare it – yellow socks
Too short to be haughty, too nutty to be naughty
Going on 40 – no electric shocks

The juice of the carrot, the smile of the parrot
A little drop of claret – anything that rocks
Elvis and Scotty, days when I ain’t spotty,
Sitting on the potty – curing smallpox

2. Along the lines of curing smallpox, did anyone catch the results of the The Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 which came out last month?

“The study underscores significant achievements, such as the dramatic drop in child mortality, which has fallen so quickly that it has beaten every published prediction.”

I went hunting for more statistics and found this chart, above, from the WHO, labeled “Global under-five mortality dropped 41% since 1990.”

Wonder – A Book That Transforms the World
Written by R.J. Paclacio
Review by Craig Wiesner / Reach And Teach

It’s okay, I know I’m weird-looking, take a look, I don’t bite. Hey, the truth is, if a wookie started going to school all of a sudden, I’d be curious, I’d probably stare a bit!

When he walked into the room, I couldn’t help myself. I stared, just for a moment. He looked so different from all the other kids in the auditorium. Then, a few teen girls sitting behind me started whispering to each other. “Oh My God… Look at him!” One of them said.

Juliane Okot Bitek knows the power of narrative. An award winning writer living in Vancouver, Canada, Okot Bitek is also an Acholi woman who calls Gulu in Northern Uganda home. Considering the civil war (1986- 2006) that plagued northern Ugandans, it’s no wonder much of Okot Bitek’s passionate writing focuses on social and political issues. In the last decade, through her poetry, essays, fiction, nonfiction and opinion pieces, Okot Bitek has fought both to make sense of, and to expose the tragedies of her homeland.

Okot Bitek comes to writing through an impressive lineage. Her late father is the famed Ugandan poet, essayist, novelist and academic, Okot p’Bitek, who was, shortly before his death in 1982, appointed as the first professor of Creative Writing at Makerere University in Kampala. Things weren’t always so rosy, however. As a result of her father’s work, Okot Bitek and her family spent the early years of her childhood in exile in Kenya. As a result of this history, Okot Bitek is no stranger to political strife and social unrest. Still, in spite of this, she describes the pleasure of growing up in a house full of books and lively debates between her parents and their literary and artistic friends. Some of Africa’s luminaries were regular houseguests: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and David Rubadiri were men she called uncle, and on a given day they might be filling the Okot Bitek household with their intellect, their opinions and their friendship.

Growing up in such an environment would make anyone sensitive to the importance of storytelling. As Okot Bitek says, “Stories are everything. Without a story, none of us exists.” But it’s not just the significance of narrative that is so dear to Okot Bitek, she is sensitive to the invisibility and the silence that shrouds those whose stories don’t get heard. This is evident in the work she has recently completed, which is provisionally titled Stories From the Dry Season. Collaborating with Dr. Erin Baines of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia and Grace Acan, a women’s advocate and LRA survivor, Okot Bitek took on this work as a way to tell the stories of women from northern Uganda who were abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A) and who eventually returned to civilian life after long and terrible years of abuse and assault.

I had a conversation last week with someone who gave up making films to start a business he hopes will earn enough money to finance major social-change organizing projects. He condemned progressives for their illusions, saying they that think if they’ve watched a hard-hitting film, they’ve done something, but really, “they’ve done nada. The most under-appreciated art and the one most needed and that makes the most difference is the art of organizing.” He explained that he meant Alinsky-style community organizing, with protests – rallies, marches, pickets – focusing on a succession of concrete steps in the hope they will aggregate into meaningful change.

I find this insistence on one form of activism fatiguing. It reminds me of the old alchemical idea: that if you perform the same action over and over again, it will eventually yield a transformative result. At this point, I think most old-style forms of organizing alone have about as much chance of succeeding in addressing our crises as ancient alchemical experiments had of finding the philosopher’s stone and transmuting base metal into gold. Real transformation has to engage the whole person: body, emotions, intellect, and spirit. But you can’t make anyone see what he or she is not ready to perceive, no matter how plainly it is inscribed in reality.

Holiday Present

My mom told me she’s a lesbian
and it rained for a week,

not because she told me she’s a lesbian
but because sometimes it just rains like that

in December, when families get together
around nine shining candles or one electrified tree

or whatever they light at the ecstatic dance solstice celebration
at Muir Woods, because it’s holiday time in the Bay

and my mom gives me a present
wrapped in a question:

Do you want to meet her?

Johnnie Mae Campbell, Rev. George W. Lee Case, and Lamar Smith are just a few of the many black men and women who were murdered by white racist mobs during the civil rights era. A contemporary artist named Nolan Lee has created a series of works to draw attention to their unsolved murder cases.

Lee pairs each pain-filled image with a paragraph about the murder victim. Here is his art and text on Lamar Smith:

Aug. 13, 1955, Lamar Smith was a World War II veteran, a farmer and a local leader in the black community in Brookhaven, Mississippi. He organized voter registration drives and even campaigned against an incumbent county supervisor. One August day shortly after an election he was downtown on business when he and some white men got in an argument. A number of witnesses saw one of the white men pull out a .38-caliber pistol and shoot Smith at close range. Three men were arrested but went free when none of the witnesses would testify to what they had seen.

Taxes are sexy.

Yeah, I said it. I know that most times you hear about taxes – from Obama to the latest Tea Party wingnut to your local city council bureaucrat – that conversation is boring, it’s policy-wonkish, and it’s usually pretty conservative. Well, it’s time to change the debate.

Meet the Millionaire Tax Virgin. This is a man who tells it like it is — taxing rich people to pay for public schools and services is necessary; it’s about justice; and yes, it can be quite the aphrodisiac.

It’s Sukkot, the seven or eight-day autumn holiday (depending upon how you classify Simchat Torah) in which religious people eat their meals in a loosely constructed booth (a sukkah) gaily decorated with plant materials. “Ushpizin” is a charming seriocomic Israeli drama, made in 2004, depicting a particularly tempestuous Sukkot in the lives of a Hasidic couple in modern-day Jerusalem.

Sukkah in Jerusalem

Liberal Jews have strong feelings about the limited cultural vistas and the unhealthy political influences that we see on Israeli policies from this quarter–more perhaps in the intrusion of religion into the affairs of state and civil life than on attitudes toward peace-making, where the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) are often confused with the national-religious camp. But this film reminds us of the positive spiritual dimension to the Haredi lifestyle.

Dramatic changes of fortune are seen as divine intervention, an answer to their devotion and a part of their ongoing dialogue with God. When bad fortune strikes, they are rendered bereft not only by the event itself, but also by the notion that they have done something displeasing in the eyes of God or, even more painfully, that their suffering has meaning they cannot fathom in the sacred scheme of things.