Decisions, Decisions

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Karen Mathieson

The Sorting Hat has trouble placing Harry Potter. In the Hogwarts home of valor and chivalry, Gryffindor? Or should it be Slytherin House, a place of serpentine cunning and ambition? Harry asks for Gryffindor, and that settles things—until he shows an unnerving gift for speaking with forked tongue. The very young wizard consults headmaster Albus Dumbledore, who tells him, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Thereby hangs J.K. Rowling’s marvelous tale, and much of what social psychologist Sheena Iyengar addresses in The Art of Choosing. Iyengar makes clear that our choices in life are conditioned not only by natural endowment, but by forces pervasive as the air we breathe: culture, environment, and lest we forget, the related art of salesmanship.

Among their many studies, Iyengar and her colleagues have researched how a culture such Japan’s guides one toward choices on behalf of the collective. This produces societies in which people receive the benefits of “freedom from” various challenges while also experiencing limitation of personal choice to some degree. Cultures like that of the United States, where the rugged individual is a primary role model, stress “freedom to.” At an extreme, such a culture can encourage profound suspicion of anything that would tamper with unlimited choice, even if there are clear benefits to one’s own community.

As a professor at the Columbia Business School, Iyengar does have a certain interest in understanding the way choice affects the bottom line. Heard of the jam study? Iyengar designed that one, which showed people will buy six times more from a yummy product line after selecting tastes from just six jars than after choosing from an array of two dozen.

Wonder why that company 401K retirement account languished? It’s likely an employer offered too many mutual funds, rather than too few, so that sorting the welter of investment options became a task permanently deferred. An approach to dealing with such paradox, Iyengar suggests in The Art of Choosing, is to consult the trusted expertise of others when and where we need it, and to focus on fully understanding what interests us most. After all, even Harry outsourced the repair of his glasses to Hermione.

At times, one’s freedom to choose dwindles with a toss of the genetic dice. Completely blind since her early teens, Sheena Iyengar writes movingly about people in constrained situations seeking ways to exercise the agency of choice. Iyengar’s book also makes fine use of visual metaphor and of images she has never seen, because many years ago she chose to learn the language and culture of sighted people in order to become a better communicator. That it works so well is a tribute not only to Iyengar, but to the collective of friends, family and colleagues who have helped her engage personally and professionally with everything from her home décor to research on the origin of fashion trends.

When Harry Potter hears slithering in the walls of Hogwarts, he is scared but resolute. Thousands of pages (and many movie hours) later he faces the greatest choice of all, but the whole time he’s been making decisions based on what he believes to be right and true. The book of our own lives can be just as coiled and complicated a narrative of choice. We don’t have Dumbledore around, but we can still hear Sheena Iyengar talk about being “choosy about choosing” in our mere muggle’s world.

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Message and Medium

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

The phrase grated the moment I heard it. “Digital immigrant,” the IT expert said, dropping its companion “digital native” in the next breath. I absorbed my characterization as sadly deprived of thumbs born to text, and accepted that to some extent he was right. A woman who learned her way around a qwerty keyboard with a manual typewriter was never a girl with a cell phone tucked beneath her pillow instead of a baby tooth. In the broader sense of a stereotyping metaphor, however, the guy was dead wrong.

“But how can you remember phone numbers when they takes so long to dial,” said the Ma Bell representative, urging me to upgrade to Touch-Tone nirvana. “I don’t have any trouble with that,” I responded, “but when it’s free, I’ll sign up.” At 25, I was already a skeptical tech consumer. If there’s a clear personal or professional benefit, if it suits my style, and if the price is right, I will cheerfully incorporate new tools and skills into my daily life. Otherwise, thanks but not interested.

And that’s why I don’t identify myself as a digital immigrant. What I am is a digital adopter. I’ve been living here all along as my writer and reader’s world has shifted from hot type to cold, and then to dancing pixels. It’s been fascinating to watch the evolution of communication media—and to sense my brain adapting to the ones I choose to use. So when I acquire not one but two digital habits in the span of a few weeks, it seems worthy of a blog post.

The first choice was to cancel the daily newspaper. That came with a pang reminiscent of ubi sunt poetry on the transience of life, namely mine as a former print journalist and loyal hometown reader. Where are the joys of hearing a paper thump the front door of an afternoon, and retrieving it to read the previous night’s work under that precious byline? Whither the pleasure of clipping recipes, and travel guides, and intriguing reports on science, history or the arts?

While the subscription to The Oregonian was still running, I started cozying up with coffee, laptop and OregonLive in a predawn December hour. Then I’d unwrap the day’s paper and cross-check to see what I’d missed. Virtually nothing it turned out, and much had been gained: A reduction of negative input from headlines about the latest bloody, random sniping. Freedom from remorse about the environmental cost of newsprint, no matter how faithfully recycled. The ability to scan several days’ worth of articles on a topical tab. Enhanced proficiency with Sudoku, thanks to interactive game features. When OregonLive starts charging, I’ll pay. Until then, I’ll read on for free.

Digital choice number two was a subscription to Ojolie animated online greetings created by a Danish artist and her IT whiz husband. Soon I was blithely dispatching e-cards with get well, bon voyage, thank you and birthday sentiments, as well as holiday wishes. Each spoke to the personality of the recipient and evoked the nature of the relationship or the memory of a shared experience. I used the space for personalizing to write more than I ever used to scribble in cards. While spending far less money (sorry, USPS and Hallmark), I gladly invested time to consider the music vibe as well as text and graphic content. Soon, delighted emails flashed back from friends. The Energetic Commodity Meter now reads: Warm fuzzies, priceless.

So, does this happy tale of Electronica mean I might suspend the pen-and-paper personal journal I’ve kept since 1978, in favor of an electronic version? The virtue of being a longtime digital adopter lies in knowing when message and medium are a timeless good fit for oneself. Glancing through worn, spiral-bound notebooks, I see how the very look of entries by the earlier Karen reveals the distress, hopefulness or delight that prompted her to write. I never want to lose that, and besides—I still love the feeling of making words by hand. When I create a journal entry, I practice an ancient reflective art along with everybody who has learned the value of the old notice “Inquire Within”. Perhaps they’re keying away, or printing because they’ve never learned cursive, but that’s fine too. Autres temps, autres moeurs whispers quaint, inter-generational inclusiveness.

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A Slip Twixt Cup and Lip

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

What is the difference between proper etiquette and good manners? Not much, judging by how interchangeably those phrases are used on the Internet and beyond. That’s at the cost of an important distinction. Etiquette prescribes established behavior in social situations and entails the use of various implements, rites and rules. Manners are another kettle of fish—or pot of tea.

Picture a genteel American tea party circa 1785, where one partook of the costly, fragrant beverage from a deep saucer. The cup, of course, was set neatly apart on a small plate. Etiquette guided the hostess to pour the cup, and the guest to transfer the hot liquid to the saucer before drinking. Being mindful of manners, one would then sip rather than slurp.

The ritual is long passé, along with the saucer by and large, but most Americans still mind their manners when eating and drinking at any formal gathering. It’s not just about which pieces of porcelain to use and how. It’s about respecting other people and bringing honor to a shared occasion.

Respect. Honor. What quaint notions these may seem in the era of grab-it-and-go. Still, it is often in the small things that one may sense the ethical well-being of a people. When we act from guiding values that demonstrate commitment to others, the result is palpable warm feelings. And when we do not, the absence makes a powerful statement of its own.

Let’s get down to cases, with two examples of missing-in-action values from the cultural setting of Portland, Oregon circa 2011. Each relates to the same cup-and-lip social phenomenon—the slip between an expressed intention and an actual behavior. Each is also about how well we honor and respect our relationships.

First, we have the curious matter of the business networking luncheon. The hostess books a private space in a good restaurant, reserves time on her calendar, arrives early, and has handouts ready for her facilitation of the event. The restaurant delegates two servers, and is prepared to handle a large onset of orders that will offset the cost of providing the room.

People sign up at an online site for the micro-entrepreneur community, through a system that allows easy cancellation. It’s a popular venue, so the limit of 16 guests is reached more than a week ahead of time. Nine people including the hostess attend.

Second, we have the even more curious case of the annual holiday-season gathering to  celebrate the contributions of a large group of dedicated volunteers. Staff members of the organization set aside a weekend day they might otherwise spend with their families, organize all the gear and decorations for the festivities, and when the confirmed guest list surpasses a hundred contact the caterer to substantially increase the original food order. Sixty-five guests actually appear.

Are the no-shows in these case studies exhibiting a failure of etiquette, or of manners? Etiquette books stretching back to the time of Gutenberg would concur that when unable to enjoy hospitality that has been proffered and accepted, the right thing to do is to let the giver know if you will not be there.

Perhaps, though, the etiquette of the age of print is now as passé as sipping tea from a saucer. People are so busy, and things just come up, don’t they? Leaving a voice mail, sending an apologetic email or going online to click “cancel” takes time, and who has enough of that anymore?

Certainly, there’s not a moment to spare for thinking of the cost to a restaurant and the personal investment of a hostess, much less to consider how someone else would gladly have taken that seat at the networking event. And who would pause to imagine how many pounds of jerked pork will return to the catering truck, or how subdued the staff members will be as they clear away the detritus of what was, after all, a beautiful party.

In the end, good manners come down to how well people treat other people. Respect. Honor. Perhaps that’s too weighty a pair of words when merely our relationships are at stake. Let’s try these: Common courtesy.

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In the Presence of Laughter

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

“What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter; present mirth hath present laughter,” sings Feste in Twelfth Night. Designed to amuse Elizabethans in a holiday season, Shakespeare’s tale of wooing gone wrong plays well four centuries later. Yet, the ribald hijinks of Toby Belch are no emotional match for Viola’s faithful love in disguise, nor for the genuine suffering of a certain prig named Malvolio. There’s more to the comedy than meets the eye—just as there’s far more to laughter in relationship than a tickle of epiglottis upon larynx.

As the calendar glows with red-letter days, perhaps this is a good time to consider ways that shared humor can be a positive force in our lives. Unfortunately, many favorite anecdotes at family gatherings are acutely unamusing to at least one person in the room. Think of a clan in which every feast that includes cranberry sauce comes with a dollop of sarcasm about one family member. The klutzy boy of 13 may now be a poised 45-year-old, but an ancient pratfall trumps present reality every time.

Let’s leave that kind of laughter offstage, as we consider five of the many ways genuine merriment can enhance life now and for seasons to come.

  • Experience wholesome entertainment in company. “Present mirth” arises not only in plays but via media Shakespeare never knew, and it’s healthy for self and the social soul alike. Download a movie to watch at home, attend a comic opera, sit at a small, round table for an evening of improv. The setting matters less than the experience of putting aside everything dark and dire for the pleasure of a communal laugh.
  • Find the humorous aspect when things go wrong. Today’s preternaturally long holiday season has a huge impact on everyday American life. It’s tempting to make the worst of things when the culture insists on ho-ho jollity. Still, in the workplace and beyond, step back to see if there’s another way to look at a mini-disaster. Find a spot of irony, a touch of the ridiculous in the scene? Share it.
  • Revisit a common history for healing humor. In retrospect, many tension-filled moments can be hilariously funny. Your dad forgot his dress trousers when he packed to attend your wedding. On the day, it was a hair-tearing frustration. Now it’s a bonding memory. When tempers flare or sorrow enters the picture, humor can help you stay connected to one another.
  • Convey a funny solo experience. “You just had to be there.” Well, not always. Tell a good story about an occurrence—let’s say a Canada goose that came in for a landing and flailed across unanticipated ice—and others will laugh. If the joke was on you, then so much the better. People tend to like and trust those who show a capacity to laugh with ease at themselves.
  • Stay present to joy—together. Feste warbled on behalf of a would-be seducer, but he was right about one thing: In love and mirth, there’s no substitute for the fleeting moment shared. The catch is, a person must actually be paying attention. Will a television blare during the meal? Will every well-polished place setting reflect the glow of a cell phone? If so, we may miss the point of more than a joke.
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Next Steps in a Natural Friendship

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

A month ago I wrapped up a project to hike all 80 miles of pathways in Forest Park, the jewel in the leafy crown that is Portland, Oregon’s canopy of trees. A week ago, on a five-mile ramble along trails I’d logged in late summer, something suddenly struck home. I felt a marked difference in how I experienced the place than the previous time.

It wasn’t just that the air was cooler and the evening light now slanting from the south, nor that trees on the ridgeline creaked in an autumn wind from the east familiar to those living near the Columbia River Gorge. My relationship with the park had also changed. The trails were no longer part of a goal to be reached in diligently charted segments stretching from an urban arboretum setting near the Oregon Zoo to the farthest reaches where a herd of wild elk convenes in winter. I was more relaxed as I walked now, more inclined to stoop and study a trundling black ground beetle.

It had been a worthy accomplishment, I reflected, as I left the beetle to its business. In 2008 I had covered the 30-mile Wildwood Trail and numerous linking paths, but I had missed out on many areas hardly anyone sees—and a few I’d rather not see again. Answering the All Trails Challenge offered by the Forest Park Conservancy acquainted me with all eleven watersheds in the park, including one with the charming name of Rocking Chair Creek. I am at ease with the park in a deeper way now, able to anticipate where the footing will be slick and the trillium will bloom come spring. The process of planning and recording the 110 miles it took to account for those 80 miles of trail left me more familiar with the lay of the land and with the life that is there.

And yet, I’m glad once again to relate to Forest Park simply as a beloved terrain rather than a task site. Heading upward toward the access trailhead on Saltzman Road, it occurred to me there might be a corollary between this insight and how I conduct other relationships. Head-down in a project with others is an exhilarating and sometimes exasperating place to be. One naturally gets to know both the work at hand and the people sharing the experience, but eventually the show closes, the project is delivered, the conference wraps up. What then?

It is hard to establish genuine friendship without taking the time to know another person in multiple contexts—as a person with a partner, a family, a circle of community, a secretly held desire. The work or volunteer goals we reach together, and the joys, frustrations or conflicts we encounter in the process, are all bonding elements. Still, the people we keep seeing when there’s no deadline to meet or carpool to coordinate are those with whom relationship has become instrumental, an end in itself. Valuable and life-enhancing as conversations along the goal-oriented way may be, taking the time to connect when there is nothing on the agenda beyond friendship is sweet indeed.

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Beyond Naming the Terrain

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

“To hear the unembodied call of a place, that numinous voice, one has to wait for it to speak through the harmony of its features—the soughing of the wind across it, its upward reach across a clear night sky, its fragrance after a rain,” writes Barry Lopez in the introduction to “Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape.”

Four years of effort by Lopez and his co-editor Debra Gwartney culminated in this 2006 book, which speaks to the elongated love affair between a language-making creature and its world. It is a decade, then, since Gwartney and Lopez conceived of the project, a decade since classes of eighth-graders in Seattle, expressing their feelings about the September 11 terrorist attacks, used one phrase more than any other: “On our own soil.”

It is a comfort even now to think of home ground, not of ground zero. It helps, even now, to read William Kittredge writing with fleet concision—no entry in “Home Ground” exceeds 200 words—of basin and range, the 400,000 square miles of the American West where the graben of a down-faulted valley marches north alongside the uplift of a horst such as Steens Mountain. One who knows that migrating wildfowl long found refuge and food in the Malheur wetlands where the runoff from Steens collects might muse on how our planet’s geology is in an eternal dance with ephemeral surface life. One aware of how invasive carp in their millions have now wreaked havoc in the nurturance of the birds might give a long sigh, and turn to another page.

And there’s the wonder of “Home Ground.” From the wide, gracious margins, in which one may read resonant quotations from fiction and poetry, to the charm of words like “krummholz” (the contorted vegetation of alpine transition zones) there is always another voice, another opening vista for the reader. This is a book to read not cover-to-cover but in which to wander and emerge refreshed.

There are deeper implications beyond the effortless acquisition of an evocative language of terrain gained while following one’s curiosity from canyon to cleft to cranny and crevasse. “Home Ground” has also been a boon for attorneys, land use planners and others addressing environmental issues in North America. “If you will be having a conversation that’s going to show up in a court of law, you’d better have your terms straight,” Lopez told listeners gathered at Graham Oaks Nature Park in Wilsonville, Oregon in late July, 2011.

At the event, co-sponsored by Oregon Humanities and Metro, Lopez and Gwartney encouraged participants to spend time experiencing the nature park, most of it now being restored as an oak savanna after a century and a half of other ways of relating to the land. Returning from the group’s walkabout, one woman spoke of encountering a point where fingers of cool air from an evergreen grove reached into the hot rustling dryness of a midsummer field.

Lopez smiled. She was describing an ecotone, he said, and then spoke of how such nebulous zones between habitats hold some of the greatest diversity of life on earth. Writing in “Home Ground,” William deBuys points out that ecotones are “human constructs, which derive their shape and character from the qualities their observers find most salient.”

Have we, in the last jumbled and distraught decade, been passing through an ecotone in American society? What other metaphors might we draw from the landscape to help us understand both the past and the future into which we now gaze, here on our own soil?

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Authentic Americana

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

It wasn’t business as usual at the Happy Sparrow Café on this hot August day. True, proprietors Danny and Mary Quach were working well before first light, preparing racks of buns with sweet and savory fillings to serve as “breakfast with a twist” (their business tagline) for their neighbors in southeast Portland. And yes, those who came by for a regular latte or an iced Vietnamese coffee left with an extra spring in their step thanks not only to caffeine but to the atmosphere of good cheer.

Yet, when closing time came at 2 p.m. Danny did not turn as usual to setting up for another predawn session of crafting kolaches: For the next few days, Danny and Mary will be racing in a Hood to Coast relay team, pounding the pavement from the glacial slopes of Oregon’s Mount Hood to the toe-curling cold of the Pacific Ocean.

Thereby hangs not only a distinctively American tale, but a study in authenticity.

The first time I dropped by The Happy Sparrow was a case of pure serendipity. I was walking along SE Belmont on the hunt for a nosh and liked the way the café perched on the corner at SE 30th. Sitting at a small square table wrapped in patterned oil cloth, I  considered why the place made me wish to linger. There were Danny’s silhouette murals in black, gold, periwinkle and persimmon, for one thing, and Mary’s burbling laugh as she visited with each customer. I liked the cleanliness, the bright lighting, and the board game boxes (Scrabble, anyone?) stacked on the mantel of a tiny gas fireplace that suggested this was a place for rainy as well as sunny days.

The second visit was intentional: I wanted to understand more about this enterprise with a logo that’s both chipper sparrow and yin-yang symbol of the Tao. How did this couple with successful corporate careers come to leave friends and families in Houston to put a bird on it in Portland? After all, Mary doesn’t even have a tattoo.

“We didn’t know where the winds would take us,” Mary told me, describing the strong sense each of them had that they were called to move on from prospering lives in Houston. Danny and Mary’s was a leap of faith in more ways than one—they are devout Christians, as well as owners of a business in parlous times. Still, that vault into their future was executed with considerable skill. As we chatted, I gathered clues to what makes the Happy Sparrow such a harmonious delight as place and business model:

  • The owners found ways to fill their food service niche with specialties reflective of their shared personal story. Both are the children of Vietnam War refugees;  Mary remembers her mother at every breakfast, sipping strong coffee laced with condensed milk. Danny’s flick of the wrist as he rounds off each palmful of kolache is a wave to people of Czech heritage in central Texas. “This is our way to honor America and the diversity we find here,” Mary said firmly.
  • The owners had the practical savvy to turn a dim space with awnings that drooped like half-closed eyelids into an environment of wide-awake sociability. They were also frugal in their up-front investment two years ago, whether coaxing the last drop of paint from a can or rummaging at thrift shops and garage sales for art to recycle. Mary and Danny wanted to make the place look as if it belonged in Portland, and it does.
  • The owners took full advantage of lessons from both their related work experience and their education—Mary, 35, holds a degree in marketing from the University of Texas, Austin, while Danny, 37, earned a degree in graphic design and communication arts from the University of Houston. They also canvassed the neighborhood to learn what it wanted, and found that surrounding businesses “had hopes for this corner,” Danny reported. The Happy Sparrow thrives in personal, professional and community context.
  • The owners know precisely what they need to be happy. While they felt a strong sense of vocation in creating a gathering place that celebrates diversity, they also chose to open a business that would let them be free to “have a life,” as Danny put it. They may get up in the dark six days a week, but the afternoon closing gives them breathing room. If their passion for distance running calls for a much-needed holiday, then they’ll take it.

These days, the proprietor of the smallest business is instructed to create cohesive brand communication across the media spectrum. By this criterion, the Happy Sparrow is secure on its electronic nest, from a cheery red-dominant website to an email address of chirp@happysparrowcafe.com. Twitter? But of course!

My sense, however, is that what a customer tastes biting into a Happy Sparrow kolache warm from the oven at 7:05 on a weekday morning is the authentic flavor of American small enterprise making good.

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Defining Moments

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

In the time it took a sheet of paper to shuffle through her printer, the future changed for Elise Ballard. To anyone else it would have looked like a brochure about adoption, snared from the Internet and intended to serve as a prop in an upcoming play. To Ballard, it conveyed a message she’d been blocking for years—that she had options about having a marriage, having children, having a life worth living rather than enduring.

Ballard was soon free of a relationship gone thoroughly bad, but she remained fascinated by the deus ex machina impact of a mundane office task. Fast forward a few years, and Ballard has researched, schmoozed, interviewed and written her way to the publication by Random House of the book “Epiphany: True Stories of Sudden Insight to Inspire, Encourage, and Transform.” Online, the complementary project of the Epiphany Channel provides updates and programs related to the book’s topic as well as photos, profiles and videos of others who have been, to be technical about it, gob-smacked by their destiny.

Neophyte fifth-grade teacher Carol Lanning discovered the strength of her vocation while helping a boy learn long division, and 33 years later is still moved to tears by the memory. The leader of the Agape spiritual community in San Francisco, Michael Bernard Beckwith, recollects the glory of biting into a radish fresh from the earth as a child of five before he describes the lucid dreams which have helped him to fulfill his mission as an adult. Stacey Lannert, who killed her sexually abusive father when she was 18 and spent the next 18 years in prison, recounts how she came to realize that one always has choices, even if they are limited to the color of one’s socks.

As Ballard notes, the lives of these interview subjects and the more familiar figures in “Epiphany” such as Maya Angelou, Mehmet Oz and Barry Manilow might be wildly different in externals, but all demonstrated four defining aspects of the epiphany experience:

  • The individuals in question were paying attention to their life situations to begin with, and were capable  of listening to what was for many was an actual, if occasionally disembodied voice.
  • A surety of belief—even in the face of social censure or resistance—that the experience was real remained absolute in the long term as well as the short.
  • In response to the compelling call of their epiphanies, every person Ballard interviewed took  action on the insight, even if the outcome was at first highly nebulous.
  • And finally, once they  committed themselves, serendipity ruled. “It is as if the world conspires to support your actions and decisions,” Ballard writes.

The people who spoke to Ballard for the “Epiphany” project also seem to have in common a reflective turn of mind and a willingness to be surprised—not always pleasantly—by their own potential. Watch author and playwright Lawrence Wright unpack the meaning of the phrase, “Take your place,” and follow the making of a citizen. Listen to Rupert Isaacson describe seeking help among the horse people of Mongolia for his profoundly autistic son, Rowan, and understand how a best-selling book and documentary (both called “The Horse Boy”) could grow from a family’s desperate search for healing.

Disparate in age, gender, occupation, and convictions political as well as religious as they may be, once we’ve met them online or in the book these are men and women whom we’d probably enjoy getting to know further. Isaacson comments in a video clip that, “We’re always feeling these blissful ripples coming off other people’s epiphanies.” In his view, “It’s the principal source of good in the world.”

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Stewardship and the Personal Pronoun

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

“It’s my nature . . .” Following the dots, I turned the mug handle from right to left. “I volunteer,” read the words on the other side. I poured coffee and pondered the play on meaning. Yes, it is my nature to volunteer. And yes, it was my nature—the part that grows in blooming, buzzing confusion in the wetlands, woodlands and prairies of northwest Oregon—on behalf of which I was spending this Saturday morning at the Native Plant Center near Lake Oswego.

Mug in hand, I walked back to my worksite between twin colonnades of young alders. There grew a poster child for native plant restoration, Aquilegia formosa, a columbine with gracefully curved red and yellow blossoms that attract equally photogenic hummingbirds. On this day, while ladybugs busied themselves with their harvest of aphids near my fingers, I was collecting seeds for plants the NPC will foster and return to their genetic homeland along the bluffs of the Willamette River.

As I stooped in the dappled shade to check for pods rattling with glossy black seed, I looked toward a sunlit bed of Solidago canadensis, a goldenrod that produces wispy seed bodies at the rate of 4.6 million to the pound. I remembered a September morning in 2010, when I was part of a team frantically gathering sheaves of the long stalks before those tiny parachutes could lift away in the wind.

A college student from Norway with an interest in restoration projects had stopped by for a visit that day. He seemed especially struck by the fact that apart from Marsha Holt-Kingsley, the Metro employee who runs the NPC, we were all volunteers. “In my country,” he told me, “I do not think we could get many people to do what is a government responsibility.”

“But it’s our land,” I blurted, surprising myself with the vehemence of my tone. I told the young Norwegian that local voters had twice approved bond measures enabling Metro to buy and conserve significant sites for parks and natural areas across three counties. I said Metro was managing the land in trust, but we knew it would take more than money for things to work out.

That made sense to me, if perhaps not to our polite visitor, but as I coded a collection sheet for AQUFOR on Saturday, I was still wondering what had compelled me to speak so forcibly of “our” land. It  remained on my mind Sunday morning, when I began the first leg of Hike 27 in the second edition of “One City’s Wilderness: Portland’s Forest Park,” by Marcy Cottrell Houle.

On either side of the Tolinda Trail, tree trunks bore witness to the labor of those who had wrestled English ivy to the ground a while ago, winning one round of an endless bout with that viciously invasive, non-native species. I happened to be wearing a shirt with a global message from Metro emblazoned in gold. “Restore. Relax. Roam. Reflect: Celebrate  your nature,” the text ran. It wasn’t likely any of the above had been on the minds of the folks who duked it out in the ivy removal project, I thought with a smile, and scrambled up the next rise.

“Your nature.” I was at the apex of my Sunday hike, sitting at the edge of a meadow on a blue-painted metal bench and reading in Houle’s book about the Committee of Fifty that banded together for the creation of Forest Park in the mid-1940s. Few of those people were alive now, I knew, yet thanks to them I had just traversed the width of one of the great urban parks of the world. Suddenly, I heard “your” less as a distancing second-person pronoun and more as the passing of a legacy. “Take this, cherish this, and pay
it forward with your sweat, your resources and your heart,” the word seemed to adjure.

Many years ago, backpacking in Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness, I stood weeping beside the trail as I began to sense what the Nez Perce tribe had lost when General O.O. Howard and his troops drove them toward exile. It took standing in that place, feeling its presence, to teach me what Chief  Joseph and his people knew in their bones.

Just now I was turning the latest Metro button over and over in my hand. “IT’S OUR NATURE,” it reads. Perhaps, I thought, becoming stewards of the place in which we dwell feels so essential, so personal, because it is.

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Broaden, Build, Enjoy

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Karen Mathieson

It’s so much more than happy talk. Positive emotions such as amusement, curiosity or hope may not save lives in a crisis situation, but they make life worthwhile the rest of the time.

Negative emotions such as fear have their place, acknowledges Barbara Frederickson, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, and the author of “Positivity.” In the moment it takes an oncoming car to cross the meridian, we can swerve thanks to a hard-wired system that confers an evolutionary advantage now, as it did when the threat was more likely to be an oncoming predator.

However, decades of research in the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Lab at UNC Chapel Hill, where Frederickson is the principal investigator, indicate that thriving while we survive is a matter of opting for the upbeat. Frederickson calls it the “broaden and build” theory of emotional well-being and life enrichment, and it has profound implications for the resilience with which we handle stress in personal and professional situations.

Negative emotions narrow our perception of options, but positive emotions tend to broaden the sense of choices, which lengthens our engagement with an idea, a person, or an experience. “Joy, for instance, sparks the urge to play and be creative,” Frederickson writes. “Interest sparks the urge to explore and learn, whereas serenity sparks the urge to savor our current circumstances and integrate them into a new view of ourselves and the world around us.”

Oddly enough, our ability to read and respond to positive emotions in others can even help us pick up on social or physical danger. “By design, humans are exquisite insincerity detectors,” notes Frederickson. Someone smiles but leaves us cold? We’re observing—consciously or not—the lack of a crucial muscle movement beside the eyes that cannot be faked. (Cheer up: It’s the same muscle that gives us crow’s-feet.)

The hefty sub-title of “Positivity” is “Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life.” Technically speaking, the ratio in the mathematical model crafted by Marcial Losada cites 2.9013 to 1, but the essence is there: Reach that tipping point between the positive and negative in your moods and interactions, and life gets a whole lot better. Double that, and a nonlinear dynamic system (think the butterfly effect) takes over, producing extraordinary synergy in the work world and far beyond.

After her accessible, wide-ranging science reportage in the first half of “Positivity,” Frederickson presents a self-help program for improving one’s positive-to-negative ratio. The guidance is as practical and smart as the author herself seems to be. And, judging by the personal narrative she intersperses throughout the book, Frederickson has been heeding the lessons of her lifework. The original mad-for-more-data scientist says that now, “I try to balance my entrenched work ethic with a growing play ethic.”

Online Extra: Meet a self-proclaimed “serendipity hippie” from Finland, Riita Raesmaa, whose positivity ratio can be inferred by her self-description, “Always in beta. And passionately so.” Raesmaa’s blog offers a link to a video of Barbara Frederickson talking about the function of positive emotions.

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