I am beginning a cleanup of my various web sites and detritus of past projects. Wake Up Stay Up obviously needs some closure - there is a hopeful update in 2003 and then total silence. The summer of 2003 concluded with Ofer heading back to Colorado, me moving back to Boston to join Dialogos as a consultant, and Kal staying in Montreal to work more closely with a rabbi there.
I contemplated shutting down the site since so much of the plans and dreams here did not come to pass. But the dates on the entries speak for themselves. And with this entry the blog is closed. Who knows, maybe someone will come across this site and decide to pick up where we left off.
SO SO much since the last post here. Many apologies. An unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates?), but we are most certainly living. Now for some examination.
First, I have to say that Montreal is an incredible city, a blessing of a nest for this egg of a project. We have been to three festivals now, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, and the Francofolie French music festival. These excursions have been welcome breaks from our work together, as well as inspiration for our own creation and performance.
Every day, Kal-El Shore, Ofer Rivlin, and I gather in Ofer’s apartment on Aylmer Street in the McGill student ghetto. Hatha yoga, meditation, and breakfast kickstart our bodies and souls. Then we read and discuss a short passage from the Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers. It is a section of mishnah from the Talmud, and gets us thinking about spirit, about ethics, about our roots in Judaism, and about the ways we can translate and transport these messages to the wider audiences we hope to touch. It’s not always easy to reconcile ourselves with the words, especially when they draw a stark tribal boundary around Judaism. But this is in part the work we have set out to do.
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We’ve solidified our plans for the summer and the initial phase of the Wake Up Stay Up project. It looks like Ofer, Corwin, Kal-El, and I will all be in Montreal for the months of July and August. We’ll be engaged in four key activities:
- Researching the long-term impact of the original Wake Up Tour
- Working together as a band to develop a cohesive sound and a few good songs
- Developing a business plan and funding proposal that builds on the lessons learned from Wake Up I
- Developing our own spiritual practice and experimenting with approaches to “Stay Up” activities that facilitate dialogue and practice in larger groups.
The decision to go for this strategy was based on the fact that we need to build gradually, drawing on insights from the past work. We have a sense that Wake Up I was quite successful (check out these articles from 1998 and 1999) but we need a more detailed understanding of its impact. We’re hoping that since I (Jason) was not involved in the first project, I’ll be able to bring a more objective outsider’s perspective. It will be a good test of my qualitative research skills as I interview people from local Jewish youth organizations and other people in Montreal who were touched by the Wake Up Tour.
Last week I wrote a paper for my leadership class that turned into a manifesto about the Wake Up Stay Up project. It’s also a meditation on responsibility and spiritual leadership, so if you’re just interested in the WUSU part, you can skip to the second half.
On Friday I presented the first version of the WUSU mindmap to my colleagues from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They were excited and had new ideas for us but also had plenty of questions and concerns. I’ve uploaded a new version of the mindmap that includes a “questions” section that comes from that conversation; there are also other additions scattered throughout.
I’ve also had the opportunity to meet two people who I think would be phenomenal advisors for Stay Up in the past week. The currents are flowing in our favor. The first was Lynn Clark, who is a Media Studies professor at CU in Boulder. She has expertise in ALL FOUR of the areas that I need help understanding: the music industry; the religious landscape of American youth; ethnographic research on media-saturated youth; and the dynamics of online communities of youth. She is very excited about the WUSU project and wants to stay in touch.
The second person was Bill Isaacs, who runs Dialogos, a firm based here in Boston. They are experts in facilitating dialogue. My professor Bob Kegan told me that Bill once ran a dialogue session with urban gang members and completely ended murder in a Massachusetts town after a couple months of work. He did a very cool exercise in our class on Monday that could be part of the Stay Up repertoire.
I’ve just built an interactive mind map of the Wake Up Stay Up project.
A beginning, an opening of a space, an invocation.
May the work we do hold the laughter of children, the dance of mystics, and the thoughtful gaze of elders resting in the sun. May our hearts beat and our lungs breathe as One, united in the rhythm and motion of evolution. May we remember to wholly listen to the spirits of guidance in ourselves and from the great beyond.
We strive to Wake Up to the morning bliss of knowledge and love that is life. We strive to Stay Up, to hold ourselves to highest standards in every moment of our days. Our music and our words will be as threads, weaving strands of synchronicity into a silken rope of ascension, drawing us from the cave to the mountain top. Once there we will join hands for a dance of sustainable interbeing and transformation. This is our world. This is our time. This is our revolution of Now.