Weary . . . but smiling

July 7, 2008

I am tired to the bone tonight but feeling like I really want to sort my thoughts and ideas about our recent weekend.  We set up a booth at the local Heritage Festival with The Bead People.  It was a long festival (4 days) but the weather was good and we had such a fun time.  Since this is our second summer, we had so many people come by and say hello-friends of The Bead People from last summer or from our school projects.  There really is a growing recognition of our little movement.  We figured out that over 2500 books and Bead People have gone out in the past year.  We began to imagine a day when that number would be 250,000 and that seeing a little Bead Person dangling on a chain, pinned to someone’s shirt, or hanging in their car would be not just “cute” but a symbol of the powerful desire we all share to have a more peaceful world and to find unity with one another.   

The booth next to ours was run by a few young people creating hemp jewelry.  They called their booth “The Inner Hippie” and naturally attracted many of today’s alternative young people.  Milt and I got to talking about those 60’s days in our own lives, and I realized that so much of the Sixties has been trivialized and passed off as if it was just about sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  I was still in high school and on the edge of the movement but was involved in my own small way.  We were so completely dedicated to making our voices heard-and it may be the only time in history that the young people stopped a war!

Over the four-day festival, we got to know those young people in the booth next to us.  I think they are longing to feel as powerful and as much a force of change as we did in the sixties.  I don’t know that we can ever repeat that era-and certainly it is about more than tie dye and hemp-but I trust that these young people are trying.  I keep wondering how we can help them become more empowered. 

Milt and I laughed together when we realized that our little peace movement-The Bead People-is simply an extension of all that we have believed and acted on throughout our lives.  We want to spread the word-we can find unity and work together to build a creative and kind world.  And we are doing it one Bead Person at a time. 

If you haven’t checked out the website (www.thebeadpeople.org) please do.  Join our little movement and watch it become a big movement.  Send us your ideas-get your own friendly little Bead Person and help us spread the word. 

At the end of the festival, we were exhausted and tearing down our booth when this older couple stopped by and begged to be allowed to buy just a few more Bead People.  We dug into one of the containers and they chose some fellows to take home.  We were all talking and they were so excited-wondering how we could get this movement into the millions and talking about franchising, translating the book into other languages . . .   I love to see how people really “get” what this is about and want to get involved.  I welcome all who want to get involved to help us spread a simple message across the globe.  People who met us at the festival are already planning Bead People events for their 4-H groups, their church groups, their classrooms, and we even had a couple of inquiries about starting a Chapter of Friends of The Bead People.  So cool.

Tomorrow we load our van and head back up to northern Minnesota to check on our 24 blueberry plants and to begin construction on our small, strawbale summer cabin.  I feel like a kid and just want to go pick berries and play on the land.  We are thinking about next summer we will plan our next alternative “cabin” and invite all who can to come and join us in the construction and then we will end it with a two-day Bead People Festival.  Want to come?

One more thing before I close for the day.  Twenty-three years ago I was in a hospital giving birth to my son, Thomas.  This year I will be attending his wedding.  There is no way to describe the many ways you have enriched my life, Tom.  I wish you and Erica a long and fruitful life and Happy Birthday, son!

Jamie

 

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Our Straw Bale Project, The Bead people Peace Project | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

God Night

June 24, 2008

I feel like I am coming home to myself at last.  I needed a bit of summer to restore my spirit.  Today I went to the park and built Bead People underneath a tree.  It is so strange how those little characters can restore my equilibrium.  The project itself is beginning to grow outside of my own creations.  My daughter, Nichol, has started the first outside Chapter of Friends of The Bead People in Lincoln, NE.  And, in typical Nichol style, she has created a beautiful, enchanted booth that makes me want to go to Lincoln and build a few just to sit inside of it.  She called the other night and told me that she had three blind people building bead people in her tent.  It was such a lovely image I nearly got teary-eyed.

It is strange how engaging such a simple project can be.  It reminds me that beads have been a part of every single human culture since the beginning of time.  They have been created from mud and glass and seeds and shells.  They have been used to adorn, as money, and of course, as gifts.  It must be embedded into our collective souls-this love of beads. 

Sadly, her partner Lynette, who is 7 months pregnant, has been told she needs to be on bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy.  Although I’ve never met her, her energy and enthusiasm for the Bead People has reached me from 11 hours away.  We will hold her in our thoughts and prayers.  Nichol also told me that she sent her husband home with a list of necessary items she would need for her hospital stay-and top of the list were her Bead People supplies. 

We are now inviting others to get involved.  You can see details and meet Nicci and Lynette at www.thebeadpeople.org.  In recent weeks we have had money donations for printing, bead donations from as far away as Australia, and several requests to get involved.  Two women at our own Journey Museum fell madly in love with The Bead People and I spent over an hour with them as they handled each little person in order to pick the ones they wanted for the gift shop.  I loved watching them play.

That is what the project is about.  It is play-with a mission.  It gives us a way to sit around and get to know each other and to talk about life and how to create the world we all want, where “family” takes on a much bigger meaning.  I love the Lakota saying, Mitakeya Oyasin-We are all related.  I believe that in my heart.  Our humanness so outweighs the differences.

I am back at work on another novel.  While we were in D.C. recently, I had a note from my agent with her list of first submissions for my novel, One Drum.  Suddenly it struck me that my life-long goal of “being a writer” was at hand and I want to be ready if a publisher wants to see what else I have up my sleeve.  The novel I went back to work on is about a small and very wise lizard (yes, I said lizard), named Sulee who is sent to help a girl named Lela.  This little lizard is so engaging.  He is smart, funny, and very sincere.  It sounds like a children’s book but it is not.  It is in the same theme of what I’ve begun to think of as my “Earth Series”.  Sulee lives in a world where the animals, the stones, the trees are all awake and aware, tuned into the earth in a way that humans have forgotten.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll post the opening pages just to give you an idea of this wise-but young-little lizard.  Oh, the working title is “Sulee-A Lizard’s Tale”.

God night.  That was a typo but I rather like it.

Jamie

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Personal Essays, The Bead people Peace Project | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)