Reflections at morning rain
after yesterday's hail and the day before yesterday's sandstorms
spring's arrival in Beijing



My grandparents always talk about the weather. If dinner conversation during infrequent visits languors, the weather topic of weather looks plum. My Yorkshire colleague claims weather is required conversation at his family's dinner table. Wow, what surprise outside the window after days of sandstorms and hail that the tiles of the courtyard houses should be wet and a tree in bloom! Rain in the desert. So I turn to piddly things like updating my blog and photos of "Arm & Hatchet" baking soda packages. Good stuff.

After a late night of AA deadlines, I woke up early for an interview about the April 1 Jane Goodall UCSD event and CLC conference call. For a moment, I forgot other looming deadlines. These morning silences hunched over statistics and emails and listening to beautiful Buddhist poet-singer-song-writer-friend Daisy May forgetting my good fortuned curse of being keenly interested in these fast times are maybe the closest to what I am.

Fast (by Daisy May, from the album "Mother Moon")

I've been away from myself.
It's time to get back to what I'm used to.
All this runnin' around.
Makes it hard to do the things I need to.

Can you see the change in me?
The way that I'm worn down from all of this shifting.
Can you love something that isn't there?
All of this running around is getting me nowhere.

Fast..............................
Fast..............................

I've been entertaining thoughts of monkhood lately...before tech is embedded in the skin. Scant time left to pop away from our globally-integrated individual enterprises. I still try to walk as if in a meditation cave, but the draws of city life and householding drag me into the turning wheel.

The birds are quieting. The city stirs. The magpies are out and appointments set. Let's hope, in our age of global climate change, that time for reflections on the millennial seasons is here for a good long while.

Labels: Beijing, reflections, seasons

Account Summary: Summer Plans, Fall Plans
After my third quarter plans
from San Diego to London to Beijing plans

My 20 credit hour quarter is over......never again will I take that many classes. I had to put just about every aspect of my life on hold. Next quarter I will have fewer classes, but they will demand even more focus. I've got to take finance and macro econ, plus the third quarter of quantitative methods (stats) and upper level Chinese. (I found a cool site where you can make and share flashcards). Plus I started as the "website development intern" at IR/PS. Here's my first article with pictures. It's nice being paid to attend, photograph, and write about events I would otherwise take part in. I'll continue my presidency at the Chinese Language Film Society. And last week I started a group of Roots & Shoots, Jane Goodall's global youth network. We'll be doing lots of things, which I've decided to do instead of write about.

I drank a Red Bull to try to get an essay pumped out tonight. My mom is visiting me from Michigan starting tomorrow for a week and I won't have time to write while she's here. But somehow updating my blog is easier than writing about environmentalism and the development of civil society in China.

So, it looks like I've secured my absolute dream internship this summer and fall. I'll be interning with AccountAbility in London this summer. Then I'll be going to Beijing in the fall to work with the head of CSR for Bayer Drug Co., China. What this will entail exactly is not clear, but involves defining AccountAbility's China strategy. It also means working with the founder and the research team on some of AccountAbility's pet projects in China, and may include surveying consumers on willingness to pay for environmentally friendly products. This means I'll take a quarter off and graduate a quarter late. Oh well. My friends told me I'd have a hard time staying in one place for too long.

I never imagined my environmentalism would lead me on the path I'm walking now. A year ago I was looking for Chavez and an apartment in Caracas, totally flabbergasted at corporate environmental destruction, opposed to just about every form of consumerism. Now I'm donning the uniform, walking the corridors of responsibility, promoting smart solutions consumer patterns, and working with environmental and business leaders to create the frameworks that will transform the destructive habits of today's disparate global entities. Yeah, there were times this quarter when I thought that learning accounting, statistics, and international politics were some of the last things I should be doing with my life, but truly they were not. I am learning to speak a language that is not my own. (And I'm not talking about Chinese). What wonder may come!

Labels: AccountAbility, Beijing, CSR, fall, internship, London, plans, summer, UCSD