Endless Knots

An Easter prayer for Tibet by Jeff Stamps

My husband, Jeff Stamps, a long-time student of world affairs, politics, and Buddhism, wrote this piece, which I hope you will read.

An Easter prayer for the Tibetan people
and their spiritual leader
By Jeff Stamps

This Easter, my prayer is for the Tibetan people everywhere and for their spiritual and temporal leader, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

This global spiritual force, with his inclusive religious mantra, is an intensely-trained monk from the distant nomadic steppes of Shangri-La, the “roof of the world.” He also runs a government-in-exile from a generously-provided sanctuary in India.

The Nobel Peace Prize apostle of non-violence, the Dalai Lama is the Gandhi of our time, albeit with more spiritual depth but fewer political skills. Since his exile, he has held the same “middle way” view: cultural autonomy for Tibet, but not political independence. Today, he struggles with both the oppression of his people by the Chinese and with the now-unconstrained frustration of Tibetan youth demanding independence. Among all of us who love Tibet for whatever reasons, we share a deep sense that time for the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” and Tibet’s very survival is running out.

By “Tibet” surviving, I mean Tibetans as an ethnic group with roots deep into pre-history, a people treated as racially inferior (“barbarians”), as a coherent religious group of Tibetan Buddhists, and as a national group of several millennia standing. For the Dalai Lama’s strategy of non-violence to work, the world must find ways to help Tibet and China find a path that provides Tibetans the cultural and local autonomy they require within the Chinese federal system of governance.

There are four reasons the world should care about the Tibetan uprising at this time: (1) the preservation of an ancient and abiding culture; (2) respect for a very old spiritual tradition; (3) the act of genocide; and (4) concern for the environment.

Ivan Seidenberg, hello? Ticket #2280341

Periodically, I have to bow in the direction of Tim Berners-Lee. The web makes it so easy to do what I am about to, taken from the Verizon site:

"For millions of customers every day, a Verizon network -- wired or wireless -- is the gateway to communication, and our fundamental mission is to make that connection as powerful and reliable as possible."   

Verizon CEO, Ivan Seidenberg

Unfortunately, Mr. Seidenberg, I'm not one of those lucky customers. We switched our email provider to Verizon about 18 months ago. There were problems, as in I randomly couldn't receive certain people's emails - like Harris, not a known spammer, at least to his friends and colleagues where he is highly regarded as a board chair, former CEO, dean, and all-around helpful person. But could I receive email from Harris, even when I wrote to him and he replied?

I made many calls to Verizon about this, of course, where I was repeatedly asked to send the email I hadn't received. No comment.

Eventually, I wrote to Mr. Seidenberg <[email protected]> and, within 24 hours, four vice presidents had called me but alas the problem remained unsolved.

Many calls later, a savvy tech figured it out and all was well...except for the other problem:  since switching to Verizon, the time-stamp on my email has been set to Greenwich Mean Time. Doesn't sound like much of a problem until someone refers you to the time they sent you an email and you have to do the math. You shouldn't have to do math to read your email or, the newest permutation of this, go on a treasure hunt to find your new mail. Because as of daylight savings time this year, now everyone's email comes through time-stamped properly, everyone except for the people at NetAge.

I, by the way, am the only NetAge person suffering from this. What this means is that my email doesn't show up in sequence in the queue, and if I skip around, reading the most important email first, for shame, then I forget about other email unless I reorder the queue every time I want to read. And do the math for the sending time of the NetAge email. Do the math, categorize, and then I can read my mail. "Powerful and reliable."

Last Tues, Verizon promised me it would be resolved within 24-48 hours. On Thurs, Verizon promised to resolve it within 24 hours.   It's Sunday. I've called Apple Support to make sure it's not a problem with my machine, gone to the Apple Genius bar with my machine, reinstalled my mail application, updated all my software, and checked every setting known to woman.

Ivan, my problem is coming from your server. Fix it, please. Ticket #2280341.

Monique: "It wasn't supposed to turn out this way"

My friend Monique Doyle Spencer has another doozie in today's Boston Globe, Working women, where did we go so wrong?

When my kids were little, my "sister" Judy came to visit. Sister is in quotes because by birth neither of us legally has a sister, which both of us regretted, so after about 20 years of friendship, we adopted each other. Judy was sitting at the kitchen table and I was cooking food to take to my mother in the nursing home (situated one good cry's worth away). I don't remember all the details anymore - but the weekly cooking was only one responsibility (my mother hated the food there so...). I was working full-time, the girls were perhaps 5 and 7 (no further explanation needed), Jeff and I had a looming book deadline, and on and on and on. "You never take anything away," she said. "You just keep adding things."

This is what Monique's piece is about. There are too many pieces for the puzzle yet we keep jamming more in. Thanks, Monique, as always:

IT'S ALMOST the end of National Women's Month and I have a big confession: I think we women ruined the workplace.

Ouch. I don't want to feel that way, but take a look. Once upon a time, when a woman took a professional job, she worked a 60-hour week on average. Her boss was a man and she thought she had to prove herself. She didn't make any more money than the guys who worked 45-hour weeks. She thought this was the glass ceiling, so she started working 65 hours instead. Still, she made no more money. She did, however, get promoted to head of her department. She was the lowest-paid department head in history, so she worked even harder.

Here's the honest truth: Her boss didn't even know what she made. He didn't care, either. She never felt secure enough to negotiate her own raise, so she waited for somebody to notice. They never did. So the extra $10,000 a year that would have made a world of difference to her family never came home. It stayed at the company where it meant absolutely nothing to anybody...

        Monique Doyle Spencer is author of "The Courage Muscle: A Chicken's Guide to Living with Breast Cancer."

One woman show - Eliza Stamps, April, 2008

Being and Nothingness
Eliza Stamps

New drawings and textiles
Opening Reception: April 17, 6-8 PM

Enmeshed, ink on paper, 15" x 22", 2008

Exhibition on view: April 17-May 17, 2008
Tuesday-Saturday, 11-6

Petra Projects
Mehr Gallery
436 W. 18th Street, New York, NY
1.212.255.0009

Join me there.

 

"Making cross-border teams work"

I've carried on before about off-the-top of the head lists of how to make virtual teams work. The one I'm about to refer to is not that.

Thanks to Leading Virtually, I came across Making cross-border teams work, an excellent article by Anik K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang in The Times of India, that provides some general principles about what the authors call "global business teams." The article doesn't cover the entire laundry list of concerns but it articulates three very well: team charter, team composition, and team process. If you're troubling over how to make these complex distributed entities more effective, satisfying, and creative, take a look.

 
   

Knitting Antioch back together

My college friend, Pat Edwards, reunited of course via Facebook, has alerted me to this positive development in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where our dear, long-suffering Antioch College is situated. On the main street in town, knitters (and passersby) are stitching artful patches around "the knitknot tree." It's a trend, apparently. See "Knitters dress up trees for public art." As this blog is Endless Knots and I've been known to knit a thing or two, look for some developments here in West Newton (says she, eying the old maple in the back yard). Reminds me of "the note tree" on our beloved Bear Island in New Hampshire, where children (and their grandparents, principally) write messages on pieces of birch bark and tuck them in a particular tree near the island's famed Sunset Rock.

(AP Photo/Skip Peterson - thanks)

Happy Birthday, Jeff!

Tibet, March, 2008

The terrible events in Tibet of the past few days have me thinking about our Tibetan friends and reflecting on the times we've spent at lectures with the Dalai Lama (HHDL, to his people). I think I've said before here (and certainly in my writing and to my friends) that when it comes to matters of spiritual practice, I tend, like my eating habits, toward omnivorism. If a body of belief espouses peace and justice and taking care of others, I'm in. And, if it is sound psychology, I'm not only in but climbing the stairs. Having spent two weeks in sessions with the Dalai Lama over the past 25 years, I feel confident saying that he is a profound psychologist. His attention to empathy and his call to work toward the happiness of "all sentient beings" resonates.

Like many others who've been concerned about the future of Tibet, my heart is breaking: two friends have received first-hand reports, which are excruciating to read, and the news this morning that the Dalai Lama, an unwavering believer in nonviolence, is willing to step down as the political leader of Tibet if that would contribute to the violence coming to an end, make me want to...you know, I don't know what it makes me want to do but it's a lot more than sit here and post to my blog.

Some years ago, my husband and I noticed a banner outside an art gallery in Meredith, New Hampshire: "Tibetan Children's Art Exhibit." There we found the most amazing collection of paintings by children who had fled Tibet without their parents (they send them out in hopes of a better life) and resettled in the north of India at Tibetan Children's Village. We looked at the many paintings on the walls and in the many drawers and listened to the story of how these paintings came about. To deal with the trauma they experience during their dangerous journeys across the Himalayas, these kids are offered art lessons once they arrive in India. Art as therapy. We decided almost without discussion to purchase two pieces, this one, "Life is a Dream," and the one at the end of this post.

We chose "Life is a Dream" because we liked it and because it was painted by a young boy, T. Lobsang, who is completely deaf. My hubby was born on this very date 64 years ago with a 60% hearing loss in both ears. Enough said. Beneath the painting, which hangs in our living room, is the small plaque that was on the gallery wall, explaining more about this talented young man.

 

We also chose a second painting, White Tara, the female Buddha associated with compassion and long life, because it was painted by the children's art teacher, Sonam Choephel. The original, which this photo can't possibly reflect due to my limited photographic skill, is exquisite and hangs in our dining room. It's especially meaningful because some years ago, Sonam Tsering, the father of our friend Phuni Meston, came to our house for dinner and said prayers in front of it. Sonam, a Tibetan nomad who fled his country after the Chinese occupation and lived for many years in India before joining his daughter and son-in-law here in Boston, passed on in 2005. I think of him every time I walk through the dining room.

White Tara by Sonam Choephel

Askold and Sven together again

Two of Boston’s great literati (and my friends, which makes them even greater, natch) team up this Thursday night for readings in the Newtonville Books series. Askold Melnyczuk will read from his new novel, The House of Widows, Sven Birkerts from his new work, The Art of Time in Memoir, both published by the powerful little Graywolf Press.

The two mens’ lives intersect most notably through Agni, the literary magazine now published at Boston University. Askold, director of the writing program at University of Massachusetts/Boston and publisher with Alex Johnson of Arrowsmith Books, founded the magazine in 1972 while a young student at Antioch College; Sven, recently named director of the Bennington graduate writing program, has been its editor since 2003.

See you there: 7 PM, Thursday, March 20, Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street, Newtonville, Mass.

Photo: Askold reading from Ambassador of the Dead, Fiction Book Club, Feb 15, 2005, my house

Geek Doctor on OrgScope

Pleased to report that John Halamka over at GeekDoctor posts today about our OrgScope in his Cool Technology of the Week series:

Understanding the six degrees of separation of healthcare in Eastern Massachusetts can be challenging with our numerous providers, private payers, public payers, and academic affiliations...

I found this hyperbolic viewer [OrgScope] much easier than an org chart for navigating a large number of complex relationships and look forward to the potential uses of this technology for visualizing our increasing connectedness in healthcare...

Over the past few months here at NetAge, we've taken a stab at mapping the relationships among the complex players in the Boston Healthcare network. Spaghetti, for sure, but since all of us here in Boston must somehow navigate that bowl of pasta, we're hopeful that these initial maps will contribute to making it easier for those working in healthcare here and for those of us consuming it. Thanks, Geek Doctor.

If you click through, you can play with the maps. This is but one picture. You can move it around, putting different institutions at the center, turn links on and off, and run analyses in a variety of ways. There's also an inside look at the organization chart of a fictitious large enterprise and Boston-Area Healthcare Network, a presentation that explains what we're up to with this stuff. Have fun with it and let me know what you think.