After a few too many late nights out, many people in the gay community begin to feel that they are ready for a new routine. Within the course of a year, I went from being lost in a college daze to feeding orphanages one pair of yoga pants at a time. This story is about how I woke up and moved on.
Not much chance of this gay man joining the Sisters of St. Joseph Convent in Peterborough, Ontario, but if there was ever a convent to attend based on its beauty and charms, it would be this one!
Designed by Teeple Architects, Inc. (teeplearch.com), this modern gem is also green. The convent will have a LEED Gold standing for sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality.
There's an in-depth article and photo tour over at Greensource.Construction.com.
Thanks to Dwell Magazine for the head's up!
All photos by Shai Gil, http://www.insitephotography.com/
{From "A Brighter Shade of Green" by Ross Robertson in ENLIGHTENNEXT MAGAZINE}
These days, the quaintly Old World mysticism of dark green—the kind of spirituality that reveres the earth, celebrates full moons and solstices and harvest time, and idealizes the pastoral simple life—often makes forward-thinking folks of all stripes run in the other direction. But we have to make sure we don’t lose the baby with the bathwater.
Environmentalism itself was born out of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “discovery” of nature—a spiritual awakening if ever there was one—in which Europe’s Romantics and later America’s Transcendentalists began to contemplate the aesthetic beauty of the world and saw reflected in its mirror new and unseen depths within themselves. Not coincidentally, the emergence of environmentalism as a movement in the late 1960s happened in conjunction with that same romantic awakening in the popular counterculture. It was in 1968 that NASA released the first photos of the entire Earth from space taken by the Apollo 8 moon mission, and that familiar shot of a tiny blue-green marble floating alone in the black distances of eternity graced the cover of Brand’s firstWhole Earth Catalog. People made it into buttons for Earth Day 1970. The astronauts who came back spoke of seeing a planet without nations or borders, a home more like home than the places they grew up in. James Lovelock, whose “Gaia hypothesis” proposed a vision of the Earth as a single living superorganism, called it the most extraordinary image he had ever seen.
“When people look at Earth from the outside,” NASA scientist John Oró predicted, “something strange [and] revolutionary will happen: people will alter their thinking.” And he was right. In those days, it was as if some cosmic aperture began to open in the human mind that helped shift us out of ethnic and national identities and into a deeper resonance with the rest of creation. This awakening to a heartfelt unity and affinity with all of nature and life—the same thing I discovered myself as a young man walking the prehistoric Sequoia groves and lupine-dotted valleys of Yosemite—is the foundation stone of environmental consciousness, the very platform of relatedness and responsibility that makes dark, bright, or any other shade of green possible. It changed the entire historical trajectory of the industrialized world, for starters.
If you want to give yourself nightmares, just imagine what our planet might look like today if it weren’t for this flowering of spiritual and moral sensibility that emerged within postmodern culture in the sixties and seventies in response to the reckless exploitation of nature and the runaway materialism of modern society. Those were the decades of every major American environmental law, from the Wilderness Act to the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and Endangered Species Act, and in no uncertain terms, we have the evolution of consciousness to thank for them...
In the years to come, I can’t wait to participate myself in the creative unfolding of a future so bright and green it’s currently impossible to imagine. And while the avant-garde eco-philosophers at Worldchanging and elsewhere are doing their best to question everything, reconfigure all our dark green assumptions, and blow the old sacred cows out of the water, I hope they don’t make a sacred cow out of spirituality. If the future of environmentalism depends on the evolution not just of our physical circumstances and social formations but also of the deeper interior structures of consciousness and culture, the most important question of all may be whether the bright green vision of sustainability is willing to grow broad enough to encompass these interior dimensions.
The good news is, I think it can. If Zimmerman is right when he characterizes the dark green call for a romantic return to nature as reflecting a kind of nostalgia for older, safer, more familiar structures of consciousness within ourselves, then why shouldn’t the call of the bright green future be the call to completely let go of them, making room for something as yet unknown? With bright green, the pressing moral obligation to take the fate of the world consciously and carefully into our own hands right now, or risk losing everything, is really inseparable from the thrilling possibility inherent in the human capacity for progress that we can make life better, richer, and more inclusively prosperous than ever before in history. And to me, that’s not just the voice of technological optimism. It’s the voice of the spiritual impulse itself.
It's EARTH DAY, so please take the time to be inspired by a new environmentalism that I find very exciting: THE BRIGHT GREENS.
What is Enlightenment magazine Associate Editor Ross Robertson writes in A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century, "Bright green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than the “tools, models, and ideas” that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions." [click here to order the whole back issue - highly recommended; it's beautiful!]
The Bright Green movement has an incredible book and blog, both called WORLDCHANGING. Executive Editor Alex Steffen writes, “We need, in the next twenty-five years or so, to do something never before done. We need to consciously redesign the entire material basis of our civilization. The model we replace it with must be dramatically more ecologically sustainable, offer large increases in prosperity for everyone on the planet, and not only function in areas of chaos and corruption, but also help transform them. That alone is a task of heroic magnitude, but there’s an additional complication: we only get one shot. Change takes time, and time is what we don’t have. . . . Fail to act boldly enough and we may fail completely.”
The Bright Greens give me hope, and for more than the health of our world. Their's is an empowering way to look at any concern (and may I suggest the spiritual health and evolution of LGBT people?). Remember Philip K. Dick's famous dictum that "To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement... Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus... thereby it becomes its enemies."
Instead, as Buckminster Fuller said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
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