Hasta La Gadget!

I chose the task of overseeing the hot drink station and offered milk and sugar to the homeless men as they made themselves tea or coffee. There was a counter between us. I was on the kitchen side serving, and the men were on the other side receiving. It felt like a safe barrier between me and them.

It was my first time volunteering at the Men’s Winter Shelter held at our church. One night a month around 50 homeless men arrive from San Rafael by bus and receive a meal and spend the night in the church recreation hall.

One man held an empty cup in his hand and told me he had a cold. I suggested he have tea instead of coffee. He was an older man with sparkle in his eyes. I asked if he wanted honey with his tea, and he said yes.

“Sweetness helps everything,” I said.

I opened kitchen cupboards, found a bottle of honey, squeezed some into his cup and stirred it with a plastic spoon.

He took a sip and smiled. “It reminds me of my mom,” he said. “Thank you.”

After all the men had gone through the buffet line, our assignment as volunteers was to serve ourselves and then sit and eat with the men. I was hesitant about this part of my job. I organized the tea and coffee station, wiped the counter, threw away empty sugar packs, and restocked the paper cup that held plastic spoons. I was afraid of the level of connection that eating a meal with someone might offer. The truth is, I liked having a counter between us.

When there was nothing left to tidy in the kitchen, I took a paper plate and went through the line. But I quickly found an excuse to return to the kitchen and searched the drawers for serving utensils. Many of the men had told me they were sick as I added honey to their tea. Although volunteers were stationed at the buffet line, I had seen homeless men serving themselves with the spatulas and tongs. I didn’t want to catch what they had, and I wondered if I could catch homelessness. I knew I didn’t want that, but then it occurred to me that perhaps I was homeless on some level, searching for the cup of tea with honey in it that would warm me from the inside out.

This is how I arrived at the dinner table–with my fruit salad, my mashed potatoes and my fear. What would I talk about? Our volunteer leader had asked us to make casual conversation. She said some men would talk and some would not, but to try to make a connection so the men might feel that they were welcome in our space. I chose to sit at a table with one of the head volunteers, Joan, and the older man who had said he wanted honey with his tea.

There were four men sitting near me at the table. They were eating and quiet. When I’m nervous, I talk to fill space. I started talking about tea and how I make tea for my children when they’re sick, when I want a break from work and in the afternoon when I’m tired. And then Joan leaned in and said, “Kathleen sang a solo in church this morning. What song was it?”

Often when I’m asked to recall the name of a song, a person or a place, I freeze. My mind goes blank, and I can’t find the answer. I know this about myself and have learned to talk around the word, and someone else eventually names what I can’t remember.

“I can’t think of the name,” I said, “It was a song about a river and everyone goes there together to pray.”

The tea-drinking man looked up. His eyes sparkled and he hummed, “As I went down to the river to pray…” I recognized the tune and started to sing the words with him. The man to his left had a silvery white beard, bushy eyebrows and blue eyes. He started humming and nodding his head. The man on my right tilted his head to listen. Joan joined in too, and I could hear her singing. The man beside me, who had been distant when I was talking about tea, sat upright and stared at me. I avoided his eyes. A few more men gathered around the table and started humming. Some began to sing a few words here and there. I could hear their voices coming in low and slow, like a distant memory returning.

I looked again at the man beside me, the one who was staring into me. This time, I held his gaze and kept singing. Tears formed in his eyes. Part of me wanted to look away, to not have to see his suffering, but he seemed to be someone who was used to people turning away. I decided I would keep singing and offer him something different. I would witness his tears and hold space for them. As I did, he smiled, a faint smile, one that said he knew he’d been seen. I smiled grateful and touched that he was willing to share his humanity with me.

When the song ended, the tea-drinking man called out, “Do you know the one Dem Bones?”

I started singing, “Dem bones gonna rise again.”

“Yes, that one!” He said. “I sang that at church camp, Baptist church camp, when I was a boy.” He sang with me and we laughed.

Others called out lines to songs. We sang bits from each one as we remembered them, helping each other with words and tunes. I sang, “If you get to heaven before I do, comin’ for to carrying me home, tell all them folks I’m comin’ after you, comin’ for to carry me home.” And then we all sang the chorus together from Swing Low Sweet Chariot.

A few men walked away to get their bedding rolls ready to sleep. The volunteer coordinator had told us that the men were tired and most would go to sleep early. A few circled in close and then drifted away. It was as if they were coming to warm themselves by a fire before they slept. The singing began to dwindle, like a lullaby softening as a child drifts towards sleep. There were three men left, and then there was only one–the man on my left, the one who had had tears in his eyes.

He stayed until I stopped singing, and then he began talking, whispering. He told me he had hard, hard things happen in his life, things he could never tell me, and that he’d done things he wasn’t proud of. He said he’d purchased a Bible and wanted to return to God, but that he had a few things he had to do first before he was good enough to go back to God.

He asked me to wait a minute, and he went to his pack and returned with his new Bible. He opened it carefully and asked me to read John 14. I didn’t have my glasses so I couldn’t see the text. Instead, he began quoting passages by memory, and I realized he was sharing his lullaby, the words he recited to himself. “Do not let your hearts be troubled…” he continued in a soft, steady voice. “I am the way, and the truth, and the light.” He kept talking, “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and in fact, will do greater works than these because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”

He told me he had to be a better person before he could return to God, and that he was working on being a better person, and then I told him gently, and carefully, that I heard what he was saying, but that I didn’t agree with him. I told him I believed he could be as he is and receive the love of God that is already here for him.

I’ve had this conversation with myself recently as I’ve worked to understand deeply what it means to forgive–myself and others. The only response I have been able to find that feels true to God’s goodness is that I get to come as I am. It is a humble walk to show up with all my wounds, the ones others have inflicted on me, and the ones I’ve inflicted on myself and offer then up. It is in the offering that I believe we begin to heal and we experience grace. We don’t have to do anything or be anything to be completely worthy of God’s unconditional love. That’s the unconditional part of it. It’s why humans are human and God is God.

“You’re already more than enough for God,” I said with complete certainty as I had seen his beauty in his tears. After I spoke these words, I realized I had said to him what I needed most to hear myself: You are already more than enough for God.

He asked me if I would pray for him, and I said I would. Little did he know that in his asking and sharing, he had saved me.

As I drove home, I wiped away my own tears and felt how deeply a meal and a night of song had filled my own cup with faith, sweetness and love.

##

Kathleen blogs regularly to The Huffington Post. To be notified when she publishes a blog, please sign up here. Kathleen is the author of two books that celebrate life and motherhood:Mother Advice To Take With You To College, a collection of humorous drawings and wise sayings, and The Tiffany Box: A Memoir, an International Best Book Awards Finalist, a true story full of humor, heartache and love–told through emails, letters, diary entries and columns about the last two years of Kathleen’s mother’s life. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious,” said Albert Einstein.

•Simon & Schuster is bringing out, in April, a little book for young people who adore movies and want to work in making them. Or for anybody of any age who is still ambitious. It’s not just for young adults. (I find that most people have a movie inside them and will talk endlessly about it if you just let them. They invariably want to cast a star in their imagined movie before they even have a screenplay.)

•THIS book is by film producer Brian Grazer, with help from Charles Fishman, titled A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life.

Brian Grazer is the man who brought us Splash… A Beautiful Mind … Apollo 13… Arrested Development too many accomplishments to mention all of them. He is professionally partnered with the equally important Ron Howard. What’s more, Grazer is the guy with the funny, gelled, standing-up-straight hair. You can instantly identify him!

His book doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. Brian tells us in the first pages why CURIOSITY is the central ingredient in a successful life, or in any story-telling. (And movies are just story tellers.) He sets out very simply to give us great examples. He opens with the tale of himself — a young nobody — overhearing a conversation of no apparent import, but his curiosity compelled him to follow up. This then, made him a success, when combined with ambition, imagination, drive, luck, etc.

The book is straight-forward and full of great advice for anyone trying to rise and shine. You don’t have to try to become a movie producer. In its own way, the book could be a guide for anyone with ambition, nerve and common sense. But first comes curiosity.

Brian’s story is of how he rose via looking, asking and delivering packages and screenplays, etc. in the show biz world. He thus, became one of movie-dom’s big success stories. It’s a tale of curiosity leading the way. His chapter on running into important people and forcing them to listen to his questions is priceless. He endured some mighty “put downs,” but he kept his curiosity.

This is an easy-to-read unpretentious highly professional memoir. And, there’s the hair.

Yes. Well, aren’t you curious about his hairdo? If that doesn’t pique your curiosity — what does?

Even in these days of changing the ways movies are made, or getting them to the public, or getting them to not be stolen, or whatever else ensues that signifies big changes in the way we see the films we do…well, curiosity is the priceless ingredient. I thoroughly enjoyed this book about how to succeed. Most of us already know too much about how to fail!

•You can’t keep me from loving movies and the Academy Awards that promote them.

I think in the year 2014 we were served up a lot of films, actors, screenwriters and directors that were first-rate!

I went to the Kips Bay Theater on 2nd Avenue and 32nd Street, to see Paddington, with an audience full of “other” children. The coming attractions of stuff that would appeal and be suitable for children ran first and I was startled by the volume, noise and implied violence and destruction. These snippets were presented so un-realistically fast that they disillusioned me. (It seems most children’s fare these days has gotten more downright frightening than I knew.)

But happily, the main feature was Studio Canal’s Paddington. And it’s not just for kids! This film about a Peruvian bear who ends up in London is just totally adorable and for anybody of any age.

Its human star, Hugh Bonneville, is the familiar aristocratic father from Downton Abbey. How they did the bear himself is a miracle, partly because of his human facial characteristics and his voice, supplied by Ben Whishaw. (He is the actor from the last few James Bond films, playing Q.)

Everything about Paddington is splendid upscale entertainment, especially Nicole Kidman as a blonde villain. (This actress will attempt anything!)

I just can’t rave enough for Paddington‘s unusual talents.

Suffice it to say, it is great — for young, old, nice, naughty and crotchety. The audience of babies, many under 3, that I saw it with, sat transfixed through the entire movie.

Highly recommended for all the family.

•TONIGHT! At 54 Below in Manhattan. The great Sally Kellerman, Oscar nominated for M*A*S*H and a welcome screen presence always, will perform her new cabaret offering, A Little Jazz, A Little Blues, A Little Rock and Roll. In case you don’t know it, Sally was a singer before she was an actress, signing her first recording contract with Verve at age 18. But movie success somewhat side-tracked her warbling, though music has always played a major part in her life.

Kellerman is busy! She’s up for an Emmy, for the IFC series Maron, and she has been so effective recently on daytime’s “The Young and Restless,” that the producers are trying to figure out how to bring her back from the dead! (Her character was dying, and then did indeed pass beyond this vale of tears. But in the soap opera world, death is nothing more than an evil twin, a hospital body switch, or somebody’s fantasy. On soaps, nobody goes quietly into that good night. Generally, they come back, quite annoyed.)

Call 646-476-3551 for info about Sally’s appearance at 54 Below.

•SPEAKING of music, I called my friend Liz Rosenberg, who has long repped the likes of Stevie Nicks, Cher, Michael Buble and but of course, Madonna. So, what will The Big M sing on the upcoming Grammy telecast?

Liz could not reveal, but she did say: “Madonna just shot a video for the first single from her Rebel Heart album. It’s ‘Living for Love’ and we did it in Brooklyn. Lots of gorgeous men and incredible dancing and she looked very sexy. But I think the most important thing was how much fun she was having!” (Liz R. and I agree that Madonna needs more fun. Really. The woman never relaxes!) “Living for Love” will be released February 12. The album lands in March.

Off the beaten path of Liz R.’s music repping, she has a new client, hockey star P.K. Subban. “He’s a great guy, and it’s something exciting and different.”

Photo credit: National Geographic

We are now 7.2 billion people in the world.

We are expected to increase by 1 billion over the next 12 years and we will reach 9.1 billion by 2050, 34 percent higher than today. Nearly all this population increase will occur in developing countries.

In order to feed this larger, world food production must increase by 60 percent and food production in the developing world will need to double. Annual cereal production will need to rise to about 3 billion tons from 2.1 billion today and annual meat production will need to rise by over 200 million tons to reach 470 million tons.

Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that doubling food production in the developing world will require an average annual net investment of $83 billion dollars, including technical and economic advice to governments on policies and legislation that influence public and private investments and capacity development to design strategies aligned with national priorities.

Agricultural production will need to increase, and along with it, the greenhouse gas emissions from crop and livestock, as well as from forestry, fisheries and land use will increase their impact on the environment and on climate change.

In parallel, and according to the State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014 report, the total number of hungry people in the world is of 805 million people. One in every nine people on Earth go to bed hungry every night. Obesity is the other flip side of the coin. Both hunger and obesity are symptoms of poverty. The scarcity of healthy options in low-income neighborhoods in developed countries and the decreased purchasing power make people opt for a unhealthy and cheap processed foods rather than seasonal and local fruit and vegetables.

The challenge here is — according to José Graziano da Silva, FAO’s Director-General, is “to feed the world population using less land, water and energy, supporting a widespread, globe-spanning transition to sustainable farming systems and land management practices.” He also stresses the importance of achieving greater efficiencies in the use of natural resources, in particular water, energy and land-including food waste, to protect biodiversity and the ecosystem.

Photo credit: National Geographic

Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome is hosting a National Geographic exhibition on the Future of Food, an informative, thought-provoking and in depth coverage in photography, maps and infographics to understand how the food has made us who we are today and how it shapes our future, looking at different world regions and exploring our complex relationship with what we eat and where our food comes from.

Walking through the different exhibition sections, the viewer is taken to discover the challenges of food production and of food supply chains; the use of natural resources and the tools to prevent food waste; the shape of the green and the blue revolution; the power of people to produce and their right to use their lands; the new face of hunger in the industrialized world and the need for a food-eco print awareness and healthier diets. The audience is put in front of major global questions on the future of our planet and how we all can make an impact by being informed and by making the right choices for humanity.

On this point, the Milan protocol for food and nutrition advances a proposal aimed at bridging the gap between three main paradoxes: 1. the imbalance of malnutrition and obesity; 2. The sustainable use of crop production directed to animal feed and the one directed to human consumption; 3. Food waste (every year, 1.3 billion tons of edible food is wasted) and the need to feed the 805 million malnourished people across the planet.

In this context, Italy has a main role to play: the Universal Exposition on food, sustainable practices and nutrition, Milan Expo 2015,will gather 140 countries to share their best practices in the fields of technology, biodiversity and traditional foods, showing the best tools and processes used to protect populations and increase local production.

A global knowledge platform for research, cooperation and innovation will gather universities and 130 international research centers around a table to discuss the challenges and the breakthroughs that can enable us to produce the right amount of food for everyone, without wasting it and ensuring it is produced sustainably and for the next generations to come.

Sharing and cooperating towards hunger eradication and sustainable lifestyles is the key to living better lives and opening doors and opportunities for research and development improvements. Finding solutions is the responsibility of every actor in society, and for this reason, we must all share a culture of knowledge-sharing and commitment to humanity.

Ideas and actions that can give to everyone the right to food, to safe and nutritious food and to be free from all types of hunger, is our goal.

Photo credit: National Geographic

Working at an animal shelter for three years, one of my responsibilities was to make sure no animals adopted from the shelter ever wound up on Craigslist or any other site to be re-homed. Did it happen? Yes. Did we get the animal back? Yes.

People use Craigslist, and Facebook for just about anything nowadays, even giving away pets. DON”T DO THIS! The logic I would often hear “I would rather put my pet in a home, then into a shelter .” Shelters get a bad name, but there are tons out there doing their damn hardest to find every animal a home.

Dog fighters scour Craigslist and Facebook all day looking for pets they can use as bait. Look at the photos below, these two animals were given away online.

Dog fighters and animal abusers will show up to meet your pet, dressed nice, act courteously, promise to love the animal, and lie the entire time. Once they have the animal you listed online, it’s highly likely they will wind up like the two poor souls above. This is how dog fighters train their animals to fight and kill. Craigslist is a gold mine to animal abusers and dog fighters, it is the cheapest and easiest way to get what they need.

Most shelters require references, home checks, and adoption fees. Dog fighters and animal abusers are highly unlikely to get around all these requirements.

Take an honest look, do pets in animal shelters or those above look like they have a better chance of finding a loving home?

If you absolutely insist on giving your animal away online, make sure you require a fee. Dog fighters will not pay hundreds of dollars for your pet. They want to train their animals to fight as cheaply as possible, why pay for an animal that won’t survive long anyway?

Keep your pets safe, never list online, contact shelters and rescue groups, family members and friends. Don’t be an idiot.

Rescue Idiot

I think we all know who is responsible for ushering in the apocalypse. It’s those scientists at Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab. Not content with snake-bots alone, they have now attached some modified snake-bots to a body to create a hexapod spider bot of doom.

Things just got more terrifying on planet Earth. No wonder the guy in the video keeps kicking it. He helped create it and even he’s all like, “Get the hell away from me you mutant freak!”

What’s next for these guys? I have no idea, but it will probably escape from the lab and start leaving a trail of bodies in it’s wake.

[via C|Net via io9 via Geekologie]