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#451 – Dick Bernard: Hummingbird. Lynn Elling and Wangari Maathai

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Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Wangari Maathai died September 25, 2011, in a Kenya hospital. I never met her, or knew much about her. I wish I had.
My friend Lynn Elling asked retired Minneapolis teacher Nancy Paxson to send along Ms Maathai’s obituary and her wonderful and inspirational recitation “I will be a Hummingbird”.
Lynn faces serious surgery Monday, October 10, and at 90 is an eternal optimist. “Can’t” or other negative talk is not part of Lynn’s vocabulary. That hummingbird had nothing on Lynn Elling, especially when it came to his absolute passion for peace.
As Monday approaches for Lynn, I want to share a memory that he shared with me recently.
Lynn is founder of World Citizen, and co-founder of the Nobel Peace Prize Festival, an annual event at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.
Each year since 1996, the Peace Prize Laureate of a preceding year has been invited to attend the Festival at Augsburg, and several laureates have attended.
Dr. Maathai was awarded the Peace Prize in 2004 for her Green Belt movement in her native Kenya, and she accepted the invitation to come speak to children at the March 2006 Augsburg Peace Prize Festival.
All was ready for the Festival except for the heavy snowstorm which brought the Twin Cities to a standstill. In early morning, the Festival organizers cancelled the event, and Dr. Maathai was marooned at the West Bank Holiday Inn in Minneapolis.
As Lynn recounted, he and several others managed to get to the hotel and at least give Dr. Maathai some company. She was in tears. She had so wanted to address the children at the Festival. Of course it wasn’t possible.
She made a huge contribution to the betterment of her country and the world in her lifetime.
The same can be said for Lynn Elling, though his accomplishments were more local.
Dr. Maathai’s Hummingbird lives on, thanks to Lynn.
Best wishes, Lynn, as you face your surgery next Monday.

Lynn and Donna Elling, September 22, 2011


More about Lynn Elling here.
UPDATE October 13, 2011:
After posting this item, my wife and I were on an out of town trip for the following six days.
Lynn’s surgery appears to have been successful, and he is back home.
On October 6, Nancy Paxson sent an e-mail, received on my return, which further comments on the snowy day in Minneapolis in early 2006: “Hi, I treasure recalling that day. My husband & I drove through the deep snow to her hotel and were honored to be included in the group to go to her hotel room. The Ellings were there, as well as Joe [Schwartzberg] and the Augsburg camera guys who video taped her telling the hummingbird story and greeting the festival children, all to be shown in April when we held the rescheduled festival. I have pictures of that morning in her hotel (someplace ) and sent copies to Ellings and others. My Keewaydin [school] Peace Choir was prepared to honor her, so she asked me to sing bits of the songs for her, and we presented her with a lovely photo book of trees and wrapped it in one of those rainbow bandanas that the peace choir wore to perform. She was tickled at that, because when she was in Japan, they had a tradition of gifting in lovely cloth wrapping. I forget the term. I was a special day, and I have shared it with many students over the years, as we study the laureates.”
And, of course, in the past few days three women, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen, were named the Nobel Peace Prize Award Winners for 2011. According to the Nobel official site, their Awards are “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

#385 – Dick Bernard: A 2:43 Speech: "Last Night I had the Strangest Dream". A matter of Climate Change and Other Things.

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UPDATE/SUPPLEMENT June 19, 2011, here.
As we all do, I dream, and I just awoke from a dream whose essential message I remember. This doesn’t always happen.
I want to share the dream, and speculate from whence it came.
For some reason I found myself as king# of the world, only for a few minutes, able to direct people who were influential decision makers.
Since only a few run things in this world of ours, I didn’t have to speak to all 7 billion people, only to a few. We were in a large, stark, room, and the few of us could gather in a corner. Perhaps there were a dozen of us. Significantly, there were no women# in this directed conversation.
We gathered in a square, each bringing our own platform, which seemed to resemble a school desk such as a student would occupy. They were of random design, these desks. Again, we were all men#.
All gathered together, I gave the direction, which for some reason sticks vividly in my mind.
Each person in this square had precisely two minutes and 43 seconds to say what they had to say. No rebuttal, no debate. Two minutes and 43 seconds.
Then I woke up.
There are people who make their living interpreting dreams. I’m not one of those people.
The back story of my dream perhaps came a few hours earlier when I, along with perhaps 70 others, men and women, participated in a powerful one and a half hours with world climate expert Professor John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. He started his talk with a satellite photo of the world, specifically Africa; he ended his presentation with photos of his two daughters, age four and five, who are, he said, the reason he’s devoting his professional life to the crisis of climate change. He is, after all, making their future, and that of their descendants. Africa in particular, and the coming generations will reap the consequences of human activity, especially during the period of the Industrial Revolution.
It was a powerful evening.
I wonder if, when I read this aloud, I’ll come out to two minutes and 43 seconds.
*
“Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream”? I first heard John Denver sing that song years ago; it most impacted me when Lynn Elling led us in that song in June, 2007. It was a moment, that one in 2007, that changed my life.
You can listen to John Denver’s rendition at my website A Million Copies. There you can also read about Lynn Elling, and also about Dr. Joe Schwartzberg’s Affirmation of Human Oneness. Dr. Schwartzberg was in charge of last nights meeting, and at the beginning, we read his Affirmation of Human Oneness, appearing at the website in the 41 languages into which it has thus far been translated.
On reflection, my dream was not at all strange.
How about for you?
What would you say in your two minutes and 43 seconds, and to whom would you say it?
Most importantly, then what will you do to put that 2:43 into reality? Not, what will you order others to do, but what will YOU do?
This is an especially important question to the women. Men have mucked things up royally, and perhaps terminally. Women can turn things around perhaps more effectively than any group of men can.
It’s time to act.
Some Resources:
Dr. Abraham’s climate science organization website is here. There is a lot of content accessible here.
A website he recommended is CoolPlanetMN. And another, Minnesota Environmental Partnership.
The organization Lynn Elling founded in 1982: World Citizen. The organization sponsoring last nights event with John Abraham: Citizens for Global Solutions MN. I am privileged to be part of both groups.
(Click on photos to enlarge them.)

Dr. John Abraham, professor, School of Engineering, St. Thomas University, St. Paul MN


Dr. Joe Schwartzberg, President Citizens for Global Solutions MN, Professor Emeritus in Geography, University of Minnesota, June 16, 2011


Extra Special Thanks to Lee Dechert who made this program happen.

Richard (Lee) Dechert introduces Prof. Abraham June 16, 2011


# – A woman friend challenged me on these references. The references were intentional, and as I remembered the dream. It is we men who have and continue to run our world into the ground. More and more women are involved, but until women make the election to take the lead, past mistakes will continue to be made.