PRO: A goal can keep you on track and when your friends know about it, they can help keep you accountable.
CON: A goal can limit you. If all along you have one aim in mind to reach, you may miss life’s serendipitous opportunities.
PRO: Goals allow us to have a say in our own self advancement.
CON: Who are we to think we know better than G-d, the workings of the universe, whatever we place our faith in?
It seems there is a line to be drawn, down the middle of what is a worthy and constructive goal, and what should be left up to life’s own natural progression.
Update: I have met most of the goals for my time spent in California:
1. $500 net saved
2. Time with friends, easy enough
3. Work with mentor, done
4. Meeting with friend who will design my website
5. Many new connections for my forum and art
6. 1 new client
I realize now I didn’t even write all of my important goals down, goal #4, for example. This is a risky path for a goal, not giving it a position on the To Do list often means disallowance, denying it a place in reality.
However, despite my true affection for list making, the second I place a To Do item on a list, the fervor in getting it accomplished is lost. It happens everytime.
What is this all about, I wonder? I admit this is an area where I feel most uncertain. I think it has something to do with the idea that when placed out in the open anything will feel less mysterious, less intriguing. So what things worth achieving should be thrust through our mind into existence and what things are better left to imaginings and fate?
Hand in hand is the topic of assertiveness. I wonder what is the appropriate place for assertivness? I am confident in my lifestyle and try to be assertive at times when I feel it is vital, but I generally don’t push ideas, viewpoints, plans, goals. People who do, wear me out and no doubt it is a tiresome existence, living one big To Do list, or being All About some things.
Again, where is the line? Living within your own fuzzy line and trying to make it clearer might be the kind of goal I could get excited about, but I won’t put that on a list.
.
Today I ate breakfast in a café – in a garage – near the beach – in Santa Barbara. The place is Backyard Bowls and here is why they are great.
There are two choices on the menu: a breakfast bowl or a smoothie. Sadly, I hadn’t the room for both so let me tell you about the food. Everything is local and almost everything is organic. Choose from rolled oats, granola, blended acai or quinoa covered with homemade cashew milk, brown sugar, peanut butter, honey or agave nectar. Next, add fresh strawberries, blueberries, coconut or bananas with walnuts, raisins, almonds, flax or hemp seeds. Add some spicy cinnamon.
A bowl costs about $7 to $9 depending on the ingredients you prefer and if you come for breakfast (7 – 10 a.m.), you may have a yerba maté for $1.
Now consider how considerate these guys are.
Backyard Bowls maintains strictly green business practices:
1. Compost all foodscraps and organic byproducts
2. Use eco-friendly to-go products
3. Minimalize electricity usage
4. Include local and organic ingredients
5. Earth friendly printing options
6. Minimalize and recycle in store waste
7. Earth friendly paints, recycled furniture & fixtures
8. Offer incentives for making earth friendly choices
The Green Card.
With The Green Card, 10 stamps gets you a free breakfast bowl. There are 3 ways to earn a stamp.
1. Order a bowl for here, not to go (reduce waste)
2. Bring your own reusable bowl
3. Return a used to-go container for composting
Dear Business Owners,
Going green is smart and can be easy peasy. People love to give their money to people who love this beautiful planet. If you need a going-green jumpstart for your business, I can recommend my green-queen consultant, Imani Zito.
Best wishes,
Kimberly
I am the eldest of 3, my brother Benjamin is 17 and Allison is 13. I am also an only child in a way, my parents divorced when I was three and I moved back and forth in between them making for rocky times when my siblings were young. We spent a lot of time apart, but I can still hear my sister’s squeaky bitty voice shouting, “Kimmy!”, every time I walk into the door.
A big reason for deciding to blog is to be in continuous dialogue with my family. To them I am the Resourceful One, the Independent One, and The One with All the Crazy Ideas. I know that I won’t always be right by their sides, and I can’t be if I want to continue to try new things, but this might help.
Family is to love. Family is to help. Family is to be together and have each other.
I am off to visit the peole that have built me up specifically during my college years in California. Three families in particular have made the stage: the Wolfe-Lyons, the MacMillans and the Demmons. Promised, you will hear more about them. Despite my frolicsome shenanigans with what my family calls The Crazy Liberals, these families have helped me to stay grounded and fresh. I have bathed their babies, designed their party invitations and made up many secret verses of Amazing Grace at bedtime.
I’ve also learned countless life skills and new ways to live well. People, if you think your family is crazy (and they probably are a little), take the time to know a different one. For me this has meant mostly babysitting and tutoring, but it has turned into much bigger learning opportunities like internships at a law firm, an art gallery and a recommendation & acceptance letter into Pratt Institute of Art in addition to lifelong friendships and reliable cashflow whenever I’m in town.
Go out and get to know a different family. Ask them if you can cook dinner, sweep their garage, or teach their 3-year-old a Johnny Cash song. Take a look at what keeps them tight, how they manage trials, sadness or things that you may not be so good at. Remember, the way I live my life, the way you live your life, the way our families live is just one way to do it. Probably, you will discover great things about your family that you never noticed and most likely you will have new ideas and conversations to share. Definitely, you will have a grander idea of what family means.
My bags are packed for California and I will spend my final week in Connecticut housesitting for a student’s family and the owner’s of Hartford’s only organic restaurant.
Of all my tutoring clients, the King and Zito family is particularly dear to me. John and Imani Zito and their combined 6 children, ages ranging from 7 to 18, have given me the foundation to living a green and sustainable lifestyle. I have been enjoying their live chai and carrot cake smoothies for years but over the past 6 months have had the opportunity to know the family better while tutoring Imani’s daughter, Malaika, in writing and darkroom photography twice a week.
Super cool fact: I don’t do this often but, Imani and I barter lessons in exchange for local organic produce and live/raw food from the juicebar, Alchemy. ALSO, I have a membership to The Growing Green Cooperative, on offshoot of Alchemy, which provides a place for sustainable community building and learning in the city.
Connected by a Staff Only hallway and office, the juicebar and the coop have been a second home to me. I tutor Malaika in the mornings, order my favourite platter of sweet baked yams, black beans, homemade kimchi and a salad covered in daikon radish and roasted sesame seeds with an oversized mug of tea and make it back for yoga and zumba classes taught by local mothers, who may or may not have their kids in tow. The coop also hosts organic community potluck dinners and documentary screenings followed by discussion in addition to many other classes and special events.
After 10 years of business, John and Imani Zito’s work has been featured in the Hartford Advocate and NPR among other publications, as they continue to meet the changing needs of a community going green. Currently they are planning to purchase and save one of Connecticut’s remaining certified organic farms. The King and Zito family has provided Hartford with the option for a sustainable lifestyle and the country with a framework to do the same. They have revolutionalized the way I think about work, food, family, the environment and business and I wonder how I will get on without them.
For the week, I intend to soak up the home-life behind the doors of King and Zito residence, a five minute walk away from the juicebar.
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The first few nights of my stay, I will be accompanied by Malaika (14) and Kierah (12); Cassie (18) will be here, running the juicebar while the rest of the family is away at a retreat center in Canada.
At 8:30 p.m. on Saturday night (June 26) it is sticky humid outside, about to rain, and I pull into the driveway and unload my suitcase. Malaika and Kierah welcome me into their Victorian home with weathered brown cedar shakes and bright purple shutters. They lead me through their kitchen, which “has been being remodeled for 3 years” and dining room fitted with a large table set for eight, into the room where I will be staying. It is a spacious room with 4 large windows covered by white or red curtains, a king size bed, an antique bureau with a mirror that makes the room appear to double in size and two chairs arbitrarily placed below one of the windows. As I drop the handle of my suitcase next to the lavendar painted furnace, Kierah declares, “I was born in this room.”
And so the evening carries on in the 2nd floor living room with a film that the girls were already mid-way into when I arrived, Memoirs of a Geisha. “We were never allowed to watch it because it was rated R, but it’s really only rated PG-13”. It begins to pour outside and I wonder when Cassie will be home. She left about an hour before I arrived and was traveling to a friend’s house to pick up some martial arts gear, by bicycle…
After the film ends we are left feeling a bit solemn, but not sleepy. Kierah asks her sister, “Can we show her the photographs?” and they take me downstairs to a built in corner bench covered with patchwork pillows and a burgundy velvet seat cushion. The side of the bench below the window opens up to dozens of family albums and boxes of miscellaneous snapshots. I begin to learn their family story as we flip through time both past and present. The girls show me their baby pictures, pictures of when their parents were married, and pictures with their new siblings, from their mother’s second marriage with John. We dig out laminated research papers that the kids wrote entitled, “Peak Oil”, “Global Warming”, “Pollution Facts”, and “The Importance of Eating Organic”. Hours have passed without even noticing and the girls give me a quick piano performance and teach me how to play DaVinci’s Challenge, a board game where you must manipulate 3 different shapes into intricate patterns to earn points. That night we put ourselves to bed at 2 am, the same time that Cassie returns from an impromptu drumming session.
My responsibilities mellow as the younger girls go up to Maine with their father and Cassie heads over to run the juicebar. She even takes the two rescued dogs, Ernest and Luna, along to run around in the urban gardens behind the building. I am left (carless and with my computer in repair, remember?) to get some work done. Just me, my camera and a notebook.
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These are my questions for the week, and after my stay I will be posting more on what I have learned. In the meantime, please share your thoughts and stories here.
1. What rules are necessary (if any) for a family to be and teach greenness & sustainability?
2. I hear they do weekly family meetings here; what big questions or discussions should be addressed at family meetings?
3. I have learned that the green/sustainable lifestyle does not mean practicality by most standards. Once making the choice to, how can a family realistically make this transition?
Many men and women have paved their own paths before me. It is important to know their stories, understand who or what inspired them, the trails they fronteired, sacrifices they made and how they defined their success.
I first learned of the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), when I was 21 years old. I had just graduated from college and was living in an artist’s studio in Santa Barbara while he was out of the country for the summer. I had an unpaid internship at an art gallery and a local independent newspaper and was earning income as an assistant to an estate planner and babysitter to my lawyer friends. There was a pulsing concern for the future in my heart, but I had just begun my love affair with film photography and was feeling mildly secure in my ambivalence because of the friends, mentors and loved ones that surrounded me.
The studio had a generous collection of literature and art books and I began to sift through them and read tirelessly. One of my first selections was A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud, printed in its original French. I did not need to finish the book nor was my French strong enough to interpret each line but the poet’s haunting presence waited in my memory and I never was able to ignore the option to rebel against the common career path saught by most of my fellow graduates.
Arthur Rimbaud was a poet who retired from his literary career at the age of 19. He was brilliant, dauntless and grievous; beset by family matters and a fear of a meaningless existence. At the age of three, his father abandoned the family of five; some believe due to Madame Rimbaud who was severely rigid and intolerant. She dealt with this social disgrace by maintaining a suffocating grasp on her children, especially young Arthur who was already showing signs of promising genius. So affected by his demons, at 16 penniless Rimbaud ran away from home. He faced a few initial obstacles (imprisonment due to boarding a train without fare money and then was sent home) but soon was valiantly touring the world and making a living on his own terms. Graham Robb summarizes Rimbaud’s life journey in his biography of the poet, “He had travelled to thirteen different countries and lived as a factory worker, a tutor, a beggar, a docker, a mercenary, a sailor, an explorer, a trader, a gun-runner, a money-changer and, in the minds of some inhabitants of southern Abyssinia, a Muslim prophet. Rimbaud is largely responsible for what we now think of as the rebel artist- ‘the poet of revolt, and the greatest of them all’, said Albert Camus [of Rimbaud]” (xiii).
Rimbaud acknowledged the Bad Blood he inherited both from his family and his Gallic ancestors, which he blamed for his erratic lifestyle, but used it to help define his character and his work. He lived authentically, true to his heart and became “the first poet to devise a scientifically plausible method for changing the nature of existence, the first to live a homosexual adventure as a model for social change, and the first to repudiate the myths on which his reputation still depends” (Robb, xiii).
There’s not a lot more to say here, but what I especially love about Rimbaud is his gallant refusal to accept his family’s dooming fortunes upon himself and how to this day many still look to his influence. According to a poll in 1991, 1 in 5 French high school students still identifies with his work (Fowlie, Le Globe). A true unconventional is revolutionary because what they have done could never be taken back or replicated. An unconventional life touches us like a pinch or the prick of a needle, except the sensation cannot be rubbed away. The day after Rimbaud’s death, the edition of his verse poems, Le Reliquaire, was confiscated by the police. Rimbaud’s final work was just as harrowing and was to be banned. According to Graham Robb, “the work itself showed that the prize-winning schoolboy had trampled the flower-beds of French poetry with an expert boot. They were often slangy and obscene, but even the incomprehensible poems had the smell of real experience” (Robb, 442). It is my aim to leave work for this world that is just as impassioned and has that same ‘smell of real experience’.
Human toil! That is the explosion which lights up my abyss from time to time.
“Nothing is vanity; all for science and forward!” cries the modern Ecclesiastes, that is to say Everybody. And yet the corpses of the wicked and the sluggards fall on the hearts of others… Ah! Hurry, do hurry; out there, beyond the night, those future, those eternal rewards… shall we escape them?…
─ What can I do? I know what toil is; and science is too slow. Let prayer gallop and light thunder… I see it clearly. It is too simple, and it’s too hot; they will get along without me. I have my duty; I shall be proud of it after the fashion of several others by setting it aside.
My life is threadbare. All right! Let’s sham and shirk, O pity! And we will go on enjoying ourselves, dreaming monstrous loves, fantastic universes, grumbling, and quarreling with the world’s disguises, mountebank, beggar, artist, scoundrel… priest! On my hospital bed, the odor of incense came back to me so potent: guardian of the sacred aromatics, confessor, martyr…
There I recognize the filthy education of my childhood. What of it?… To go my twenty years, if others go their twenty years…
No! No! Now I rebel against death! Toils seems too trifling to my pride: my betrayal to the world would be too brief a torture. At the last moment I would strike out, to the right, to the left…
Then ─oh!─ dear, poor soul, would not eternity be lost to us!
I would like to start this (very first) post with a charge to myself and to you to quit waiting around for a perfect opportunity.
Just the other day I lost my cell phone to the waters of the Farmington River, my car to a giant puddle, and my computer to who knows, but it won’t start. My point is, I am in no ideal situation for a perfect beginning. I’m stranded at my mother’s house without access to any files or artful first essays. Nonetheless, here it goes: a bit about myself, my aim for this blog, and how I believe that we can help each other to help the world.
My name is Kimberly Gill, I am 25 years old, from Hartford, Connecticut and I am in the middle of making some really big plans for my future. Since my childhood I have travelled far and wide. I have lived in Harrisburg, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. Alas, I am a New Englander to the core. I find my peace on organic farmland, on green hilltops and in eternally chilling watering holes. I am unabashedly green and I work to inform my students on how to eat, live, learn, and share organically and sustainably through The International Forum for Revolutionary Youth. Education is really important to me. I earned a dual undergraduate degree (B.A and B.S.) and then moved across the country to attend a reputable art school. I cannot wait for the opportunity to go to graduate school but this will be on the back burner until I get those butterflies that tell me I am ready. One last thing, I yearn for unconventionality. Nothing thrills me more than frontiering. I’m a mover and a shaker and I’ve got a nack for resourcefulness (more posts on this to come). If someone says, “No” or “It can’t be done”, I take that as a personal challenge.
So you must be wondering what the “really big plans” might be. Up until now, I have been pretty timid about my intentions, ideas and goals. I also haven’t always known what I wanted. Actually, I haven’t always known how to organize, develop, and monetize what I wanted. This naturally requires a whole lot of work, but it is what I intend to do. Here is what I have done so far: I have have given up my apartment, gotten rid of my car, hired a business consultant and opened up a few frequent flyers accounts. I am presently headed to California to visit with some old friends and spend time with my best friend and mentor. While there I will save money from babysitting, housesitting and tutoring while I build content and clientele for my forum, and prepare to launch internationally. In the meantime, I will be breaking it all down on this blog in hopes that I can connect with and inspire other young unconventials and revolutionaries. And please, stop waiting. If you have an idea, even if it’s just a fuzzy idea of an unconventional career or lifestyle to benefit others and the environment, feel free to send me a note. I do know some people 
and will do my best to help.
Here is what you can do to get involved:
Thanks all & peace to you,
Kimberly
