To celebrate, I have compiled a list of my favorite Greek folk dances. We’re dancing those at GreekFeet this month. I was asked to pick my top five dances, so the first five dances are in order. Well, sort of. They really all are my top choice

If you click on the name of the dance, it’ll lead you to dance instructions. Please feel free to add (or correct!) in the comments… I am still learning, so some links might be going to the, uhm, wrong dance…

• Messaritiko (video)
• Raiko (video)
• Tapinos (video)
• Troirou (video)
• Brovalete Sta Domata (video)
• Yariska (video)
• Zonaradiko (video)
• Tessera Matia Dyo Kardies (video with the arm movements I learned in Cologne and how we do them at GreekFeet)
• Popova Kerka / Papadokori (music)
• Maleviziotis (video)
• Pentozali (video)
• Kritiko Syrto (video)
• Sofka (video)
• Naxos Nisiotiko (video)
• Drista (video)

I hope you’ll celebrate with me by watching at least one of the videos – and, if you, can join me dancing on Monday!

And, of course, I am celebrating this anniversary also in part to counteract the matrimanical idea that only wedding anniversaries are worth celebrating. So, let us celebrate also as a reminder of all the important events in our lives!

I don’t quite know why but I don’t enjoy most couples dances. Maybe that’s because I am more single at heart and thus prefer to dance with a village than a partner. (There are some couples dances I enjoy – and they are all mixers, that is, you don’t stick to one partner… like this one or this one). There also seems to be something of my personal wounding that now gets into the way (and I intend to work with that…), though I remember not being interested in couples dances long before my traumatic experiences in coupled relationships.

That last bit took a while to sink in: I never was interested in couples dances. And I thought that’s all there is to dancing! Growing up, I didn’t know there were line dances. I thought all dances were done in a couple, preferably with a romantic partner! I did not get into dancing until I was 40 years old because of that – and when I started, I took it up like a sponge because it allows me to express myself in ways I very much enjoy.

To me, the analogy to marriage (and coupling) is straight forward: One reason I got married (and later ended up in coupled relationships) was that I thought this is just what one does as an adult. It didn’t even occur to me that one could choose to be single! That is a direct reflection of the couplemania in our culture: Adulthood is defined by certain cultural normative markers, one of the most important is marriage (and having children), especially for women. Other options are redefined as undesirable, weird, and pathological via singlism, so we tend to avoid them.

Maybe the (seemingly) larger interest in couples dancing amongst younger people is a reflection of similar cultural norms: We just dance in couples, no other options. So, if we were to gear our dancing offers toward couples, we are simply perpetuating the myth that this is the only dancing there is! People who might fall in love with dancing don’t because they don’t want to learn couples dances – and think that’s the only option (or one of two options with free style dancing the other one, which seems to reflect cultural hyper-individualism).

This then boils down to the same thing that I mention in my workshops: This is all about choice! And choice can only happen if we know all the options and these options don’t come with a huge bag of shame that comes from breaking cultural norms.

Even though we don’t really know what will happen, it is clear already that climate disruption will be, well, disruptive. Like Sandy. Like the droughts, the storms, the “weird” weather. How these changing weather patterns will impact us humans remains to be seen. One thing seems to be clear, though: If we want to keep the Earth from becoming an inhospitable place for human beings (never mind other species), we need to change our ways.

That’s the other reason I’ve been mulling this post over. Exactly what does that mean? There are lots of lists out there already. Lots of organizations working toward climate solutions (including the EPA). All these lists haven’t helped. CO2 levels continue to increase, in fact, they’re increasing at a faster clip. Changing lightbulbs is obviously not enough. Switching to a differently powered car is obviously not enough. We need more radical changes.

While I believe that we can really only address our climate disturbance contributions by making some systemic changes, there are things we can do as individuals. And of course, if enough of us make personal changes, the system will change as well – at least if we stop applying bandaids and make more fundamental changes. What can we do then? Of course, we can use those lists as a start and then add more actions to that. So buy local, walk more, and turn off your vampire electronics. More radical things involve bigger changes: Move to a smaller place, share your house, sell your car, grow your own food, don’t have children. Basically, don’t shift your consumption to greener things because that’s still consuming; instead stop consuming as much as you can. (And yes, that’s a huge challenge!)

Ultimately, reducing climate disruption will require that we live differently: In smaller places with less people and without jobs that require us to go elsewhere. It might be a bit of a return to the past. Who knows. Again, what is clear is that change is needed. Deep changes. Radical changes.

And we are killing her.
Slowly.
Surely.
With our habits.
With our greed.

On this mother’s day
let’s stop the charade
and start the change
for we all claim to love
our mother.

On this mother’s day
let the love flow
to change our lives.
We can save our mother
when we act now
and live a better world.

It is time to stop ignoring the facts: Climate disruption is happening. The only way to lessen it is by reversing course. Solutions are out there. It’s time to act and implement them.

As the President, I expect you to take a leadership role in saving humanity from its self-destruction.

Yes, I hang my laundry up in the living room. It takes some planning because it takes 2-3 days for it to dry in the foggy area of San Francisco I live in. It’s best not to have visitors when you got your underwear hanging around . I hand my laundry to dry because dryers use up a lot of energy and are hard on clothes, something that makes wearing them as long as possible a bit shorter.

It takes a while to hang things up, so I tend to think while pinning the things to the clothes rack. Why aren’t more people doing this? I wondered. Maybe they don’t know how much energy a dryer uses? I gotta tell them! Somehow my glance fell onto a clock and I realized that I had just spent about 20 minutes hanging one load of laundry. That’s when it hit me: I can do this because I have the time! Right now, I don’t work full-time, nor do I commute. If I’d be spending 9 hours at a job (8 hours plus a forced lunch hour) and commuted an hour, I would throw my laundry into the dryer, too. Well, I did not that long ago…

The idea that a normal adult life includes a 40-hour-a-week job is interconnected with climate disruption! The 40 hours we spend building someone else’s pyramid (to use an expression from Daniel Quinn’s “Beyond Civilization“), we cannot use to hang our laundry, cook our meals, grow our food, fix our stuff. Much of our consumptions are short-cuts because we just don’t have enough time in a day to do it all. That’s aside from the ridiculous idea that we have to go from one box to another – in a box – to do our work (i.e., commuting from home to work in a car or bus or train).

We’re facing a tremendous challenge – on several fronts – for the very survival of humanity, well, at least of civilization. Doing the math, it is clear that business as usual will give us the usual results: An increase in atmospheric CO2 and climate disruption. Underneath the climate catastrophe – taking in the interconnectedness – are other issues lurking. Instead of changing light bulbs, we need to start asking what makes the very way we are living not sustainable – for ourselves, our communities, and the planet. It is not just the amount of non-renewable energy we’re using up and spewing into the atmosphere. Reducing atmospheric CO2 requires substantial changes, radical changes that go to the root of life as we know it. Like the idea that we should be working 40+ hours per week, own a house, and drive a car (and be married and have kids, to suggest questioning the idea of the nuclear family…).

This reminds me of a brief conversation I had with a recruiter. She could not believe that I wouldn’t want to work full-time. She wanted to know exactly why not. These are the kinds of beliefs we need to leave behind. And, yet, there’s another connection: Cost of living. Even my little one bedroom apartment is too expensive for the projects I am working on right now. I will either have to downsize further or find a corporate job to maintain my standard of living. In other words, reducing our work hours is not as simple as just doing it. We are facing a whole web of interconnections that make this more difficult – from the lack of part-time jobs that pay well to the fact that we need well paying jobs to maintain our ways of life. And there it is again: A reminder that we cannot maintain our ways of life when we fully take in all the interconnections.

The other day, I pondered on a t-shirt saying: “Change is good. Make the first move.” Or something like that – putting the onus of change on the other person. If we’re all waiting for the other to make the first move, nothing will change. And I know all too well how scary it can be to make a move outside of the culturally defined boxes – and not knowing whether others will follow. Our need for belonging is very strong – and the threat to our survival from climate disruption too abstract to counteract it. It takes a lot of courage to make the first move. We need more courage.

Here another interconnectedness becomes clear: The hyper-individualism of our culture makes the collective changes much more difficult. If we didn’t have to go it alone, it might be a lot easier. If our culture celebrated diversity rather than stereotyping it, we could experiment in new ways of living. Of course, those experiments are happening in many places. These are the other people, though, the weird ones, the hippies. (That is the stereotyping I am talking about!) If they only worked a real job, they’d be normal.

Maybe what we need is a courage web. A way for those of us who are pushing the boundaries of cultural norms to support each other. As Daniel Quinn points out, the most insidious myth of our civilization is the idea that there is only one way to live. To change that, we need to learn to celebrate all the myriads of ways people live – learn from each other and support each other in finding our own ways. There is no one right way to address the crises. My intent with this blog is – at least in part – to share some ways, like hanging my laundry and living in a smaller place. Or not succumbing to couplemania and all the stuff that comes up with questioning those cultural norms.