Punta Cana

What it was about the rolling blue waves maybe none of us could quite place. By the look of the beach goers, by the hundreds, that lined this strip along the Punta Cana coast, there wasn't need for questioning it for long. The sun beat down beautifully, like a gift of warmth that caressed your shoulders and fell over you face and made you feel like you were a child again, safe, innocent, warm. Blue was everybody's favorite color. The white sand was a grand blanket. I sat on my new favorite beach couch. It had become my lookout. The girls were bobbing in the surf. I had a Presidente. Miguel hadn't been seen in long enough to let the daddy guard down. I got to thinking about him again. There were few ways that Miguel would know who I was, a sleuth from the states, as you might say, although there was no real good term for observer of human nature and action anymore. Most of the romance in the last good long time had been sucked out of the American soul like a vampire feeding on itself. I got into it for two things, the mechanics and the romance. Why else I'd be sitting on a tropical island with my three beautiful daughters playing games with the casino outfit was a fair estimate how my world worked in general. I remembered being prepared for such things when I was a kid. I'd watch the toughs walk around with scowls and acting like they ran the program. I didn't like the bully types too much. I spent a good portion of my adult life making sure they knew some other folks were around, watching, maybe sticking up for the little guy, if that's the phrase you wanted. There was one person who knew who I was. The sun was heavy on my forehead. A young couple with nothing more than that two slips of white cloth walked by slowly, tan as leather, making sure we all saw the luxury. I took a sip of the Presidente and sent out a quick call to Sabrina. "Hola, Kane family," she said with a burst of both kindness and pep. "Sabrina, this is Jay, how is your day so far?" I asked. The girls would be disappointed if I suspected her of any of underhandedness. It hurt to make the call. "Sabrina, there are two things that I would like to look into for tonight, if you have the time." There was a moment's pause. We were on cellphones, no wi-fi on the tropical beach. "I am wondering if there is any babysitting service in the room, and whether I can book a seat at the casino tonight?" There would be one of two responses. A pause, to think or a strong effort to place me. There was a pause. "Oh, of course, let me look into it Mr. Jay." Just then a beach pan handler stopped out about five feet in front of me waving a box of fine looking cigars. I hadn't had one in a year. At the casino I would probably want to look like I knew how to smoke one.

Punta Cana

I left a purple towel over the back of the wicker cabana chair and the cold cup of beer on the bar and slipped over along the left side of the hut where the resort boys were handling the towels and cutting coconuts with machetes long enough to take down a tree. The path along the back wasn't really a path so I had to bob and weave under the low hanging palm trees, which they didn't make dull either. I could hear Miguel and a newcomer shooting the breeze in Spanish, maybe something about the two maids walking by on the sidewalk minding their own business. I tapped him on the shoulder nice and soft. He didn't expect that. "Hola Miguel, now let me introduce myself. My name Jay Kane and I come from the states. Way up there at top, where it's far too cold come January and so we all bunch in our planes and make the flight so we can sit inside a blue sky for awhile and mind our own business. Why the tail?" Miguel was far more cheery looking in person than he had been afar. He feigned a lack of language in the beginning, but quickly snapped out of it. "Oh, Hola, yes, a tail you call it. Do you mean why am here at the resort? This is my job, I am a personal concierge, for your family." It was a fine try, really. "We already have one of those, her name is Sabrina, and my kids like her a bunch." Miguel wasn't sure what to do with that, so he made a quick gesture over to his friend, a long, more slender kid, with a strong mane of black hair, perfect teeth, but a different uniform than Miguel. He poked in the conversation with a little more gusto than Miguel. There was a chain of command that was slowly revealing itself in this play and I wondered just how far up it all stopped. "Mr. Cisnero runs the casino here on the grounds. You have seen it, yes?" Now the pawn pieces were beginning to line up on their squares nicely. "Sure, sure, we walk by it every night on the way to ice cream. I tried to stop the next chess piece before it could be picked up. "Please kindly let Mr. Cisneros that this is vacation with children. No funny stuff. When you are on a foreign island it means your off duty, for real. "Mr. Cisneros is very willing to make sure you never see your hotel bill, if that helps," said the tall one, no smile this time, just two serious eyes and a little chess piece in the voice. The hotel would set us back far more than I would have ever anticipated, that I could concede. "Let's take a short walk down along the sunny beach so I can keep a look out alright?" Hundreds more people had filtered down to the soft shores in the just the last half hour. Rocking catamarans scooted across the horizon. Tall white sails like swords cut through the scene and long fishing boats bobbed at the surf. The three girls were all knee deep water timing the crashing waves to ride them in face first. "So boys, there is my job right now, three of them bobbing in the water, having a gay time. That's it. "As much as I have enjoyed meeting you both, I assume I won't be seeing you again. Adios." I took a seat up along a small beach ridge that carried bunches of kelp, warmed up a little, then ran as fast as I could into the warm water and caught a wave.

Punta Cana

"The girl said with a nice burst of charm: “I have a wonderful idea, darling. Why don’t we just take a cab to your place and get your convertible out? It’s such a wonderful night for a run up the coast to Montecito. I know some people there who are throwing a dance around the pool."  – Raymond Chandler, from The Long Goodbye








A nice vacation spot like the Paradisus needs another tough walking around in uniform like it needs seven more sunny days a week. I wanted little of anything on these few days but a tumbler of the state pilsner, Presidente, a smile when it was handed to me, a dose of sunshine, and a slow and easy to follow walk along the jogging path back to the room at the Reserve. The set-up was all in place. Miguel, for whatever reason, had been watching me from around twenty feet for the last half hour. He was a fair sized gentleman, but not too big to scare tourists. They keep the big guys off premise. The fellows in green suits walking around with machetes to use on the palm trees are plenty to make sure we tourists walk around the plant with caution and sincerity. I had seen Miguel from the night before, at Fuegos, a nice Latin fusion spot off the lobby, and the girls and I, although we left well fed, all knew that this fellow knew something more than he should have, and followed us out across the moonlit, outdoor lobby, at a nice pace. As a civilian, especially on vacation, I always say to each his own. If someone is on the beat and watching someone else for no reason other their own curiosity, I say that is what I do for a living myself, and I do hope, no matter the circumstance, the gent I'm following doesn't randomly turn around, blow my cover, and we're all out a salary. Here down in the Dominican I'm working for myself though. The sun was ripe as an orange. I was on President three, easy lagers, no big deal, and the finally the color of my fair skin was changing from stark pate white into the higher hues of pink and even brown. Things were goin fine. My three daughters were on their own because they were smart and knew how to walk around a beach and have fun without trouble. They always knew where I was, and if something happened, I was watching, sure as the very sun that landed here on this fine island, and we handled it all together. Back to Miguel. He had a bead on me and I wasn't too sure why. My last case was little, there was no carry-over on this one, clean, paid, the young woman, rightly so, found justice and I was a part of it. That is what I do. I go out and look a little harder than the next guy to find justice, I suppose. Once I tracked the husband who was once a week performing the injustice, both my client and I recognized right away that this was not the end of the world. He was a nice. A quiet man, but who got caught up with a little too much unsolicited confidence from some other younger gals who liked the looks of free drinks back in Madison, Wisconsin, the place from which I grew my pasty white complexion, and from which Miguel, just this moment, was acting far too jittery at twenty feet. If it had something to do my three daughters, the poor fellow could consider himself in a long night. I hoped this wasn't the case...I was on vacation. "Sandra, I'd take one more small cold cup of Presidente if they are still pouring," I said. I had gotten to know the tenders fairly well in the past three days. This is where you got the towels and the pilsner. Sandra was sharp as a tack. She got to know me. I was alone this trip with the girls. The mother, bless her, a better person than I, was back in the midwest working. We had been separated for a year, and it was going, frankly, just fine. I took the girls on weekends, she got the youngest during the week. "One more Presidente?," Sandra said, a beautiful young woman, a good bartender, and luckily for me a stand-in mother, which I liked. I pulled her in a little closer. "Who's the tall one in the background over there, under the tree?" I pointed. She knew. The large cabana tables were stationed in rows under tall palms and the sand was as smooth as cappacino cream "Oh, yes, that is Miguel." I nodded. "I know that much. Why would a bright young man like be following me since last night?" Sandra would tell me the truth. I found that out the night before, after the pool light show, when she pulled me aside and gave me the heads up on where to station the girls for the next day. She had three of her own and worked as many jobs. Once she was done tending bar to hordes of white folks from around the Mediterranean and America, she went off the next, then the next. The young woman was immediately a hero of mine; I think she liked the fact that I had three daughters and watched them, like a bartender, from afar, always thinking. "I would stay away from that one," she said, but didn't offer much else. I took a sip of the President. It didn't hurt me much. "I'll be right back," I said, sitting it back down, half full, making a little click as I dropped it, so Miguel would know what was happening next.

A Little Kelp

When the still cold and pasty midwesterner first reaches an azure beach down in the tropical depths of Punta Cana, a sort of double calling come over him. First, he might wish that his skin color might quickly transform to ghost-like to something closer to the color fine clay, and quickly. It is not a particularly globetrotting characteristic to look as though you live trapped inside some basement on a farm in Iowa. The other is, of course, to dash out into the crashing waves as quickly as possible and get a feel of this otherworld known as rolling sea. So we dashed out into the five foot waves and felt the gently undertow at the backwash of waves glide over our feet as it pulling us by our ankles a little deeper, a little deeper, to where the warm water climbed over our chests and the three of us rocked there like large buoys, warm, and on a free ride. My sunglasses on, I grabbed them tightly in my hand, so that I could dive under the waves and get my hair wet, for I know that they would slip off at the first streak underwater and that would be that, no more sunglasses under the sun for this trip – these were prescription and so served as not only sun blockers, but as vision itself, a nice feature. We rode a series of fifty waves; at the down trough of the wave, we could feel the bottom at our toes; at the crest, we were in well over our head. Buoys out another hundred feet marked the end of the course, where larger and more rolling goliaths stood and erased the horizon line. This was good for now, "I think I'll head in to find a nice sun chair to sit in for a while," I told Julia and Carly, 16 and 12, two heads bobbing but touching with their toes and smiles as white as the skin of the back of my hand which I saw still carried the fine prescribed glass, so I slipped them back on, the water only up to my waist by now, but also at the ver point where the waves were crashing and jetting into shore as what looked like to me the perfect body boarding material. How could I resist. Children next to me were timing the crashing of the waves, diving with it, and being transported at the speed limit at least. I watched behind me for the next crasher. I took a couple of steps, ducked down and dove, head down into the whip of the wave and was carried for a good twenty feet, where I began to feel the sand at my belly. This was fun, I should try it again, I said to myself. As I stood up, the beach and the chairs and the people walking looked awfully bright and vivid. Weren't they a moment ago muted, dark, and gauzily yellow? I slowly lifted my hand up to my eyes and there didn't seem to be anything surrounding them, like big black prescribed lenses that would have been handy for such a trip. No, they had taken the ride along with me, no doubt whipped off at the contact of the dive, and so therefore somewhere bobbing along the bottom of the beach with those crispy bunches of kelp. Oh well, this trip, I considered, will be seen in technicolor.

"My time in Britain describes a kind of bell curve, starting at the bottom left-hand corner in the 'Knows Almost Nothing at All' zone, and rising in a gradual arc to 'Pretty Thorough Acquaintanceship' at the top. Having attained this summit, I assumed that would remain there permanently, but recently I have begun to slide down the other side toward ignorance and bewilderment..." – Bill Bryson, from The Road to Little Dribbling


The advantages of standing at curbside check-in outside the Minneapolis Airport at four in the morning at thirteen below zero waiting for the passport scanner to warm-up enough to hopefully save you one more trip inside the terminal only to stand in one more twenty foot line are many. For the travel optimist, just living in the midwest in the winter time means you get to leave it at some point if you are lucky and a wise planner. And as you stand under the ceiling heater at curbside, you realize that the trip has only one direction to go, and that is up and that is south, down where the sun is strong enough to burn through the clouds and actually shine down on both plant and person, and temperatures down there are closer to that which the human body responds to pleasantly, and doesn't feel responsible to add seven more layers of clothing just for a brief leap outside of the car and onto the sidewalk. There is a moment – it is the mind warp of a lifetime – as you stand inside one of these midwest moments, to fully come to grips with the fact that only five short hours away, through sky, through airport, through taxi ride along some never seen before road, that there will be Paradisus! Punta Cana, Dominican Republic; there will be walks along narrow teak wood trails meandering in among palm trees as tall as our very own leafless oaks. It is actually true that all of this energy of projection toward the future is used to get through the three hours of sleep the night before inside the cramped hotel room shared with three daughters and a wall heater that likes to sing uneven baritone, of and on, off an on, and whip the lacey curtains like long ghosts onto your side of the bed. Because you know, at that very moment of near hypothermia, the color blue still exists outside of the mind's eye. Water is warm somewhere. Waves along the beach roll over the ankles like mini massages. In a word, part of the appeal of living in the northern center of the middle of midwest is that it breathes both the prospects of fire and glory into the idea of escape.

"Well, I have never been hit so startlingly and hard. Suddenly I was the most bewildered and relaxed person in France. My legs buckled and folded beneath me and my arms grew so independently lively that I managed to smack myself in the face with my elbows." – Bill Bryson, from the Road to Dribbling


The skies in Wisconsin for the last two weeks haven't offered much of anything interesting to follow except for a few final patterns of geese that have seemingly digested the fact that indeed there is to be a real winter here and that it might be time, just this last moment, to tune that compass south where, at the least, you know things are going to be a little more lively this time of year.  The season becomes a little more excruciating up here in the farther northern climes of the continent when neither sun nor snow shines, which leaves the outdoor enthusiast will little more to look foward to than anything white that might form on any surface, somewhere...anything is better than the monotonous jigsaw pattern of leaves that now create a kind of tired canvas we might call seasonal limbo. Well, by Christmas day, we got a little bit of everything to take its place, in spades.  Last week might have peaked by temperature to, say, 45 (hard to keep track of highs these days, really), but we now received a plummeted temperature of negative 10, accompanied by slight dustings of enough snow to offer a little white wash over the blasé canvas and that the waterways had begun to spin their crystalline webs and surfaces now exist where only brown water had been. Now we're gettin somewhere. And so it had become time, we hoped, to "get outside!" again after a good heavy handful of limbo weeks as the citizenry had taken on gradually the glum monotony of this new season. My middle daughter and I chose a close and usually very choice hike up along one of the ridge lines of a bluff near the house we lived previous to where we live now, but same city of Onalaska. This is old farm field and meadow that rises to the standard woodland that turns birch and poplar up around the rockiness. The wind had stirred up, pushing that brand new and very pushable light layer of snow into certain kinds of snow devils. We rose up through the meadow losing our foot grip on the hardened tundra-like path, still dirt, but like rock now, and lined by packed ice. Most every inch of our bodies were covered either by pant or scarf, but if there was a last millimeter still exposed, this was the kind of cold that would sniff it out, lay a trap for it, I'm sure, like a hunter and attack. And attack it did. There is also something far more vicious about the paradisically sunny day that is also the coldest yet of the year, or for the rest of the year for that matter. The mind wants nothing more than to bask; it remembers the residue of boredom from the previous month, and perhaps it is the ancient complexion of the retinue comes to crave like the artist a set of bright watercolors over the gray hues. It is enthusiastic, it is determined to walk up to the very source of it and hug that old sun at the top of the ridge and look down upon the valleys in all their clarity and vividness. We began to spring from tree to tree for cover. Our gloves simply weren't fit for the exercise. The wind was laughing inside our hoods and even our ears, under fine hats, were beginning to tell stories of what it will be like to get back inside to the solitude of the condo as soon as possible. "I feel like my eyeballs are cocktail ice cubes," I said, for that is exactly what I thought of at that moment, "all you'd have to do is slightly pop the back of my head and they might very well pop out frozen. We could use them later for Christmas drinks." As we ran a little faster up to the grand rock formation of the ridge, one of those odd balanced rocks that had been carved by the wind over millions of years, we wondered too if this rock was at one point another man with such dreams as to reach the sunshine on an Arctic day, lost all of his clothes and got stuck there for a very long time. He protected us from the wind for a moment, just long enough to begin to remember what it was like to have skin over rock of bone. Another gust whipped our eyes something like a wet kitchen towel. We looked at each other, shook our heads, then ran down the slender trail as quick as possible. A moment later, I heard barely through the three inches of padding over my ears a slight kadunk, and there was my middle daughter flat on her back. She had slipped on thinly serrated soles and, as she was falling reached out for the only branch available to stabilize her fall – and lo and behold, it was, of course, a thorn vine, of which its spikes and easily found vulnerability in the thin cloth fingers of this particular pair of gloves. She thought she should say ouch – for likely there was a thorn in some finger – but of course there was nothing there to feel, and so had to wait a couple of hours back home after a bath to yelp out loud. "Look at though, outside, it's sunny!"

The New Business Writing

"In the corporate world, your documents, emails, and instant messages become your personal brand."

"Only 6 to 7 percent of emails receive a response"  – Jack Appleman, from 10 Steps to Successful Business Writing


Food Writing for Business

There are hundreds of writing rules that we could absorb in order to improve upon the essence of the quotes above – that on one hand our writing becomes our brand, but that virtually nobody reads our brand.  There might be two distinct causes of this crisis of main stream writing. One is that attention spans have dwindled to such a degree that to place effort into what is perceived as a simple or silly email is, unfortunately, a waste of time. The loss of both patience and furthermore the ability actually expand thought as a consequence borders on tragic.  Another possibility is that we haven't quite captured a new writing potential for business, with new modes, new frameworks, and new interest. Statistics might not completely bear this out, but after teaching composition and other writing courses for ten years, and trying my own hand at daily writing in the blog form, there are a few things that I think I have uncovered when considering how writing might better match the evolving writing (or lack of) mindset. One is that contemporary business writing books still apprehend better writing through the well established fields of concern such as clarity, directness, accuracy, tone, proofreading, etc. These are given; there is really no such thing as extended prose that should have any plans for success without these. Yet it seems that what the contemporary mind craves has something more to do with varied interests. This is to say if we were conducting a college English composition class, we would want to make sure we work hard at the topic choice level, for when a student digs-in a bit in their chosen topic and realizes that they recognize a piece of themselves in the subject, many of the rest of the writing process takes care of itself. The chief reason why many of the essays I read to correct were successful or not? Topic choice, identification, vital interest. Once this is established, all of a sudden the need for good analysis and clarity become a matter of investment and credibility. A student chooses to find out more about sentence construction when they care whether their audience cares or not.  All of this translates to business in some finer ways, to be sure; at the end of the day, of course, business people have to write business reports and business emails. But how might we figure out ways in the workplace to gain investment in writing? I'm doubtful, but could be wrong, that the answer is harder and deeper analysis yet in the subject matter at hand, the business task at hand. Instead, we need to open new ways to see the business task, new ways to come to appreciate our own brand (voice) as it relates to our communication. My thesis would be that to create other, horizontal, modes of interest in the workplace could do the trick. I might call this Food Writing for Business, in which food might be thought of as a metaphor for any subject other than the mechanics of business. By studying M.F.K Fisher, the queen of food writing, we might open up pockets of shared interest within the workplace. Most people eat, many cook, and the mind tends to wander in this direction anyway throughout the day. Tonight's restaurant selection is a topic that might garner seventy-five percent of email response. Along the way, as we engage the process of cooking on our own, we invest ourselves in the eventual food writing. We share it. Our peers come to read other examples. We could, once we get used to the process, begin to consider more effective means of relaying food writing. Fisher always creates very effective leads. She often brings in fine anecdotes. Can an anecdote be effective. She brings in history. How about facts? How do we incorporate those? We may try to avoid her often sardonic tone so that we don't disturb the peace, but by avoiding it we come to understand it, and why it slips into some folks' emails all the time. The point is this: you can either teach business writing by doubling down on business itself, by taking the shovel to it, so to speak, or you can learn better business writing sideways, from another angle, using the skills gained by taking on a topic of personal interest and then eventually applying those very same skills and craft into your emails and reports. That night, at your favorite restaurant, you might open up the conversation with your significant other, by telling a business story, then asking whether it was well told, and why.

Chicken k'dra with turnips
and chickpeas

"It is Berbers we have to thank for tanginess and couscous. A tagine is a glorified stew worthy of poetry – aromatic and syrupy, zesty and spicy, or sweet and fragrant are just some of the words that come to mind." – Ghillie Basan, from Easy Tagine












The slow cooker has always had its place in the kitchen. The insta-pot, a fairly new popular phenomenon, turns out a nice meal in a relative flash. But what happens if we take away the technology and get similar results from a ceramic that has a thousand year tradition behind it? The tagine concept has been interesting to me for a long time. 'One-pots,' as the cooking language goes, have really come to exemplify for me the best of weeknight family cooking because it solves so many of the problems of the six o'clock rush – you get proteins, you get vegetables, you get it tender and it you get it as comfort food, usually fairly quickly, even if done in nothing more than a cast-iron either stop top or in-oven.  The wonderful cookbook Olives, Lemons and Za'tar, by Rawia Bashara inspired me to re-think the process of the one-pot by celebrating her own version of the chicken tagine, which I tried as a pan one-pot.  Although wonderful, there was something still quite tantalizing about the clay pot with domed hood and cylindrical handle that may or may not have a hole cut into it for steam release. I could imagine days at the desert bizarre accumulating turmeric, turnips and smen (a made butter that cookbooks say takes some getting used to), tossing them into the bottom of this authentically decorated pot and letting it steam its way to magic. Because of that circulation (similar, let's be honest, to the insta-pot), the tagine approach forces us to simplify once its on the stove. No need to stir and fuss, just let the lower seep to the upper and back down again, carrying along its way that bed of spices and vegetable aromatics along with it.

So I bought my near 3 qt. tagine and tried a chicken k'dra with turnips and chickpeas, a dish that is traditionally cooked in a large copper pot and packed with plenty of vegetables.  The recipe covered all the essentials, of chicken, onion, turnips, and chickpeas, seasoned by turmeric, garlic, coriander, and finally topped by parsley. Even though this was my first true tagine experience, I decided anyway to make a couple of additions that I thought might round out the texture and the salt – I added some pitted greek olives, both green and purple, and also added cubed eggplant over the top, where I new the soft texture could both hold its shape but also absorb the recirculating flavors.  Our gas fired stove top is potent and it took no more than 35 minutes for the k'dra to finish. As I lifted the hood a steam cloud rose up. Underneath was, to my excitement, a near replica of the picture of the same dish shown by Ghillie Basan in her easy tagine cookbook.  Take the tagine over to the counter, set the hood at an angle over the bottom bowl, and not only do you have a non-sticking one-pot, but one that is visually enticing. Spoon the thighs and essential stew over or near couscous and this might very well be as close to Moroccan one-pot cooking as the home cook can get. It got me to thinking that it would be very easy to consider using the tagine for virtually any meat, veggie and bean combination that suits your taste. A favorite beef stew set into the tagine comes to mind; meatballs; two large turkey legs and new potatoes? Insta-pots are fast, but I'm not sure they are as easy or interesting as the tagine.

Olives, Lemons, & Za'atar

It seems many of the most memorable cookbooks by restaurant owners read and look like generous invitations not only to their restaurant tables but also to the tables of their childhood memories. Rawia Bishara, owner of the acclaimed Middle-Eastern restaurant Tanoreen in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn offers us just such an invitation. She begins her cookbook Olives Lemons & Za’atar: The Best Middle Eastern Home Cooking  (Kyle Books 2014) by telling us that her name, Rawia, means storyteller in Arabic. “I was born into a food-loving Palestinian-Arab family in Nazareth, a beautiful town in southern Galilee. Though the words ‘organic,’ ‘locovore,’ and ‘sustainable’ were unknown then, my parents’ approach to food and cooking qualified on all counts. They were ‘foodies’ before the word was coined.” The rest of the cookbook follows as a stunningly colorful Mediterranean family photo album capturing Rawia’s dual tributes to her homeland in Nazareth, and to her mother, Monita Hanna. She was “an impressive and enthusiastic cook who whipped together meals for the seven of us…though she was influenced by the cooking traditions of her native Galilee, her approach was not rigidly authentic. She understood the value of bending the rules when it came to cooking, a practice we relished at the dinner table.” Each recipe in the cookbook recounts in some way this hearkening back to the remembered cultural rituals of Middle-Eastern cuisine based on her mother’s inspiration.

Readers learn about the tradition of Mezze in Middle-Eastern culture, “small plates of food served all at once, before the main course, to provide a bounty of tastes and textures.” Raw Kibbeh (usually the freshest and most lean cuts of lamb or goat, mixed with bulgur, rolled into balls), Hummus, Eggplant Pate`, Baba Ghanouj, and Mutabal, are all dishes that may ring with some familiarity from Middle-Eastern American restaurants. In Olives, they are offered with a sprinkling of special instructions from her mother. “Whenever a dish called for tahini, my mother tried leaving it out because she felt omitting it instantly lightened the dish.” We find out in the section “Big Dishes,” that the idea of eating the biggest meal of the day for dinner was foreign to Rawia until she moved to New York. “Back home in Nazareth, lunch, or Ghada, was the grand meal and it was always served late in the afternoon.” She describes her memory of the ritualistic making of Palestinian Couscous with Chicken, Chickpeas and Pearl Onions in a short section titled “The Romance of Maftool,” a wonderful little story about her mother and father sharing cooking responsibilities at a time when men were rarely if ever seen in the kitchen. The reader gets the feeling that to visit Tanoreen would be in many ways a visit to those small towns surrounding Nazareth in Galilee.

Seed Money: Some Notes
 on Non-business Business

"The more exposure I gained to the 'official' world of business, the more I began to doubt that I was in business at all. I seemed to be doing something entirely different....I believe that most people in new businesses, and some not-so-new businesses, have the same problem." Paul Hawken, from Growing a Business







In the introduction to his findings after receiving thousands of business cards after a thousand talks, Paul Hawken describes in Blessed Unrest that he came to a moment where he realized that we are currently witnessing, sometimes without really seeing it clearly, the largest social movement in known history. To put our fingers on this movement is virtually impossible because it is doesn't necessarily spread in the same way as, say, big C Capitalism does, with a broad set of tacit assumptions, maneuvers, models to follow, and certain life sequences that are associated. "This movement, however, doesn't fit the standard model. It is dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. It has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority to check-in with. It is taking shape in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, companies, deserts, fisheries, slums–and yes, even fancy New York hotels." Hawken and so many others involved in this emerging field, which could be called sustainability as well any other word, have provided examples, case studies, data, hope and realistic assessments for many years; followers who don't necessarily know they are followers continue to forge new modes of the Natural Economy, as Hawken described it in another book. For many the movement might stand out as something futuristic and glaringly one-sided as a progressive movement; others, I think just as accurately, could claim it as a restoration, or a getting back to, something follows normal or common sense. In a word, then, features of the new economy could and likely should appeal to some degree or another to all who would like to either enter into the field or to consume from new modes of doing business that are actually old modes.  Restoration in landcare usually takes a process of observation to engage in and finally achieve a series of goals.  When looking at a parcel of land, the restorationist can first see that some radical disturbance has overcome the plot – more than likely it has become fragmented, has sprouted by non native species, and that between the two of these things it has become something not only unsightly but it has lost positive function either for its own self or for the surrounding area. A goal to restore, if we assess it truly and accurately, holds values that are both progressive and backward looking. It might be progressive because the process has to do with taking a stand against the status quo and deciding that is worthwhile to interdict, transform, and move the process forward for the sake of something that is other than mere human use. It is backward looking because the restorationist tends to consider what the plot might have been before the disturbance. There are in fact natural ways of land; left alone, certain plant and water features will co-evolve to create what should be or should have been. Restoration is fully human in its capacity because it does not shun one thing over another for the sake of politics or profits, two disturbances, if you will. Business, likewise, could use restoration. On one hand, the business restoration could certainly use examples like Hawken who, as he says in Growing a Business, found a need in his own life that was not being met in the business community, in his case a natural foods retail outlet. It then takes the perseverance to create this business despite the odds and to fight for something 'other.'  The reason that the movement that Hawken stakes out is so nearly impossible to define is that this 'other' will likely vary from person to person, business to business. It expresses human nature more accurately in this way. It observes a need for not only innovation but restoration; where innovation and restoration meet is, to some degree, sustainability. "This movement toward new enterprise must reflect a certain amount of alienation of the work force from the conditions of their jobs." Although these particular words were written all the way back upon publication of Growing A Business in the late 80's, the same information was just verified in Jack Appelman's very contemporary data that he used to promote the concept of re-engaging the workforce through stronger writing skills in company-wide communications. He mentioned that only one-third of workers feel that that are fully engaged in their work. Seed Money might take the form of various restoration specialist – those who seek to tap into what we have come to see and understand as a much more varying level of human intelligence and emotion in accordance with whatever we do.  Seed Money could become its own enterprise – the application of restoration practices to the world of business, the last, and by far the greatest, frontier for shaping a new century of thought, action, purpose and lifestyle.

La Crosse River

"My heart has always been serene and lazy
like peaceful Green Creek." – Wang Wei, "Green Creek"












Why not take the autumn trail along the river
instead of the path through dying marsh?

The soft banks fold down to the beach
as we slide with boots on our hands and knees.

The hawk above must gain a chuckle as we fall
into the soft sand bar just by the length of our toes.

The water is brown; a log pile black by shadow.
In our heart is the old farmer who used to plow

across the stream where now the old oaks nothing
but tangles of lowly buckthorn and bittersweet.

The New Business Writing

"The twenty-first century will be anything but business as usual. Institutions must now balance the need to make a living with a natural ability to change. They must also honor the souls of the individuals who work for them and the great soul of the natural world from which they take their resources. But finding the soul in American corporate life is blessedly fraught with difficulties."  – David Whyte, from The Heart Aroused




A very interesting statistic is found on Jack Appleman's blogpost discussing psychological investment in company of the modern American worker – that only a third, it had been found in a poll, are engaged in their jobs. Either this tells us something nearly unbelievable about modern culture and work, or it is, and has been, accepted as some kind of truth of the way it always has been. My guess is that former more likely, on balance, the correct notion, and even though, of course, the latter might have always been true to some degree, I do quickly wonder about the difference of investment of the farmer, say, from a hundred and fifty years ago who essentially had to 'become the land' in order to both nourish it and receive nourishment, and a farmer of today, who hustles about from managing one large piece of machinery to the next, who doesn't really know where her product comes to land, and spends most of her time sweating the prospect of coming debt. The first example, without romanticizing, had to have hands on plants and seeds, had to tend to milk cows at night after dinner and might have known cow number three by name, and tended to the soybean supply because his best friend would be picking it up in a month to distribute it among other friends.  This very simple example could quite easily be transferred over to the business world; we have to assume that some of those very tissues of investment, of dream, of care, of purpose have also there eroded as the statistic above suggests. In this way, business is running at about half-productivity, really, with only one eye on the work itself, and another larger more wanting eye is on something else entirely. And what is this something else is one of the questions that Whyte asks in his book the Hearth Aroused. The transformation from a publicly driven culture to a private one has taken its toll, no doubt, on the over behavior and care in the workplace; to regain at least another third of the worker's attention might very well be one of the more effective programs any small or large business could conduct. Imagine if the statistic evolved to two thirds, and that the worker spent 75 percent of themselves in their work as they were working compared to 50 or even 25. Attention spans have diminished for many reasons over the past 20 years; the standard culprit we point to is the fact that we are surrounded with more external distractions than any other time in human history – it would be very difficult to argue out of this point. A modern worker could, depending on the type of job he or she has, spend an eight hour shift with their minds on all of the various options that show up either on phone or on screen while doing whatever task is at hand.  In years past, it is true that the worker could be thinking about other things, relationships, issues, dreams for much of the day, but never has there been such a tantalizing onslaught of visually, temporarily entertaining options. Conversations might very well rally around the distraction more likely than the work, hence the one-third engagement claim from above. Answers?

Theories of multiple intelligence tell us that we are not, and never have been, one-dimensional creatures who merely portray one set of interests and capable of achieving one set of tasks. For all who have interacted closely with an introvert either at home or at work, for example, has come to realize that he or she might very well be the most articulate person in the room that morning, a true leader, organized, bright, engaged; but that if that same person is asked to give that same presentation later in the day, or again the next morning, something, some energy that seems imperceptible, drops off, loses momentum. We assume many things about this drop off, but how often do we accept both the brilliance and the 'fading away' of this particular person. What we don't fully understand, perhaps, is that this person is now also considerably brilliant in her own private work, quietly, diligently and constructively. Maybe she is 50 or 75 percent engaged, if she is accepted. Rejections of her personality, her introversion, will diminish her abilities by a considerable amount. What would happen if this particular worker was now engaged in a learning platform, at work, in which her other side is engaged, allowed to perform, but quietly from behind the scenes. What if she was involved in spearheading a topics blog post for the office workers? What if, a varying times in the day, groups of workers were engaged in secondary learning on other topics which maybe, just maybe, they were allowed to choose? What if there was an ongoing writing class that wasn't necessarily just about business but about topics in nature, poetry, multiple intelligences. In the domain where we had been losing two thirds of our workers to lack of engagement, has just been reharnessed. What if, as we take this example down along its farthest reaches of the imagination, business of fair size had continuing education agents built right into their hires?  The mind that used to hunger for some disruption through the use of the next phone app, might now gravitate toward the topics courses. Purpose is reengaged in the job not because the worker has been confronted with the one dimensional motivation of monetary reward (of course this could work for many as well), but because now the job and the workplace is associated with something that is both separate (the topics course, writing, teaching, etc.), but connected to the job.  At the end of this particular day, will the worker go home and enthusiastically bring up one more detail about the task they are hired to perform, or will it bring up details about the history of restoration projects ongoing in the local area? Write your interests on pieces of paper, toss them in the hat, and we will take a look at them at some point for a very casual 'cover discussion,' at lunch. Let's write about that, nice and easy, maybe a mere shared email format to begin. Maybe it is brought up that there are place to participate in the very thing that we are discussing on saturday morning. On monday, what did you find out? Through all of this, it has to be understood that purpose and mission constitutes a large part of the ability of the multiple intelligence models of mind. The inherent, deeper, more psychological components of the mind must be satisfied alongside of the precise job that is being asked for. Let's say that older more traditional values used to fill up that space and time. It seems safe to say, and we can leave it here, that people had more connective psychological tendencies in days when, frankly, there just weren't quite as many choices of lifestyle and belief as there are today.  Now it is the very pursuit of disparate modes of engagement that is the potential system of connectivity. To see that workers come from all different modes of living and belief systems can be the very commonality that could be used to reshape purpose.

The new business writing, then, is not necessarily about grammar, editing ability, even succinctness (although, again, these are positive features of writing), but instead it is an ability to take on side topics that at first seem dissimilar to the business at hand, but that allow for individual interests and expressions to become collective interests and expressions. Poetry in the workplace has a foreign look to it at first glance, but poetry is a very immediate mode of expression which draws from, by near definition, all sorts of avenues of the intelligence. In other words, poetry reflects the state of the modern mind far more fully than the one-third engagement level of the task oriented workplace.  Human being today crave psychological purpose more than any other thing in American culture. To be associated with a particular brand, bright and shiny by logo, popular by peers, will last only a short while for most compared to the engagement of all that resides underneath the veneer of the logo. We can't expect workers to take these initiatives up by themselves; owners, managers, leaders of all kinds need to create these avenues of 'in shop education.'

Mr. Sam is Here

"But the waiter was nowhere to be seen. There was nobody in the picture. Nothing moved there. Even the Merry-go-Round had disappeared. Only the still stress and the grass and the unmoving little patch of sea remained."  – Travers, Mary Poppins









What had happened next, as they all began their tour of Snapdragon Farm, Sam could only consider a very sharp experience of deja vu. Out the back door into the wide open lawn between the home and the small hobby barn, and then, out into the distance the great prairie that led to a vast savannah, it seemed he had been here before, felt the very place. He found himself picturing small fence lines around the back side of the bar, seeing crabapple trees nearer the back of the yard, even the location of the chicken coop, down on the long side of the barn, seemed familiar.  "Mr. Sam, are you alright?" Rose asked, as a look must have come over him that was easy to see. Caitlin and Natalie had already split off and where just opening the small service door of the barn and a moment later were displayed inside the hayloft opening on the second floor. "Dad, come up here, there is a rope for swinging tied to the rafters!" Sam had pictured this and felt that he had swung on that rope before. It was a most unusual feeling. "Mary," he said quite quickly, "who did you say you bought this from? When you and Jack initially bought it, do you remember?" Mary thought for a moment, as they walked past what looked like an old mechanical shed of sorts, and smelled still, of hay and milk. "When we bought it, I wasn't living here, so I really don't know, but I do remember him saying it was a very old couple, too old stay on a hobby any longer, and none of their children lived anywhere near. It just about broke them to sell it, but we gave them a very good price, Jack said. He made sure of that. Why do you ask? Over here is a bean shed, just enough room for an old pick up to lay underneath the floor." "Well, I..." the words couldn't quite come out, so silly, and he didn't want to come off as some dreamer, not on his first visit to the children. "It just has a familiarity about it, that's all." Paige and Rose had split off in their own direction, toward the chickens, and were beginning to call out specific names, "Esmerelda, Candice, Eustice." Needless to say, none of the hens immediately came their way, until they began to drop some feed near them at the fence, and then they came. "Well, it has that feel to it, many others have said, a kind of farm that looks like the prairie days. Many kids of a couple of generations ago still had oak openings on their farms. That was where the cattle grazed."