What's So Great About Growth?

Finally. People are starting to ask, "What's so great about growth, anyway?"

I've studied economics a little bit, enough to know that GDP and the capital markets depend on growth to stay viable. The textbooks and articles I've read speak in dry tones of why growth is both good and to be expected. It's a point of view that leads to problems like the housing bubble--and we've all seen the mess that unbridled real estate development has created.

But now, as the world's economy and ecology face a crisis of massive proportions, we're all wondering about ways to sustain ourselves and future generations without creating and consuming products that destroy the environment. (And on that topic, why do celebrity magazines and Web sites obsess over celebrity babies, who will grow up to buy too many mansions and cars and use up tons of jet fuel, like their parents before them?)

Check out Thomas L. Friedman's latest column in The New York Times: The Inflection Is Near?

To Be Poor

Thought for today, when the U.S. Labor Department reported the nation's joblessness rate at 8.1%, its highest point in 25 years:

To be poor, sadly, is still to be without a voice and without power.... The very phrase, "the poor," lumps together and depersonalizes billions of individuals with different unique stories and voices which are seldom heard, because the rich and powerful shout more loudly. It can be tempting for those attracted by Franciscan simplicity to rhapsodize about the ennobling properties of poverty. This is dangerously patronizing. -- Rowan Clare Williams

Best. Horoscope. Ever.

What a relief that I'm not trying to be a bad girl anymore. That was hard work, man. OK, being a good girl now will also probably be work, work, work. But we're in a recession, so it's to be expected. And as far as I can tell for modern women of the Western world, you can still drink and be a good girl. So I should be fine.

Anyway, the hubby & I plan to go on a Grand World Tour in 2012, the year of the Great Apocalypse. Isn't 12-12-12 the day the world as we know it is supposed to end? If so, on that day I want to be somewhere on a beach in Bali or Barbados enjoying the end of days with other global villagers.

Meanwhile, we're saving up money, looking at maps and fantasizing. My plan for the moment is to take a massage course in Bangkok, work in an orphanage in India, study belly dancing in Turkey and learn how to speak either Czech in Prague or Slovakian in Bratislava. (I'm not sure where the hubby will be during all this. He's made some vague murmurings about wanting to go to Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia to look around, see things, meet travelers, check out stuff and do some volunteer organizing.)

I'm happy to report that the month we started to plan our Grand World Tour, July 2007, I read my Best. Horoscope. Ever. in the Village Voice I think it was. This is the July 2007 horoscope for Capricorn, but feel free to use it as your own personal horoscope for today and the rest of your life. I know I do.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) I predict that you will soon be drinking your morning wake-up beverage out of a goblet made of gold mined in ancient times. Songbirds will appear near your window to sing you tunes that magically unleash your dormant genetic potential. Out of nowhere, servants will arrive and offer to wash your feet in jeweled basins once used to baptize the children of queens. Maybe most exciting of all, you will command the power of the wind and lightning. OK, so maybe everything I just predicted will only occur in your dreams. But even if that's the case, it's a sign that you're in a heightened state of receptivity to miracles and wonders--which suggests that they will soon be swirling around you.

Bow to Your Good Qualities

Welcome to Good Girl Blog. I've been blogging on Bad Girl Blog since 2006, and maybe you've been reading me there. But last month, the Bad Girl Project came to an end.

"I'm at a creative stopping point, and I don't know where to go next," I wrote in my final post.

Well, it's been a month since I said goodbye, and now I'm saying hello again from this new blog. I'm not sure where it's going to take me. Not knowing is one of the fun parts of a new creative venture. I hope you'll come along for the ride every now and then as I open my heart and head to a Good Girl Project.

Back in the days of my Bad Girl Project, I chronicled my research, experiments and studies about wild women past and present--and my struggle to be more like them. Now, I'm going to try to free myself to be "good," whatever that means, and look for new role models. For many modern women, yesterday's vice is today's virtue. And often, good and evil are mirror images of each other.

Just the other day, my yoga teacher here in Brooklyn told our class: "Bow to your good qualities." It was a phrase that stuck with me. My yoga teacher is Buddhist, and every now and then he tells us about karma, which means that you get what you deserve in life, good or bad. If you do good, good follows you. If you do bad, bad follows you.

Now I've just got to work out what good is. I've spent the last three years worshipping bad, evil, wicked women, so I've got a big job ahead of me. Especially since I generally admire the women of the world who have been judged by society to be bad.

I'll start with a story from Buddhist teaching, followed by a photo of myself trying to be virtuous while balancing on one foot. The journey toward goodness begins. I expect I'll stumble every now and then. In fact, my friend had to take the picture below several times because I kept falling out of the Tree Pose.

The Instilling Goodness School in California tells this Buddhist story:
"Once a very old king went to see an old hermit who lived in a bird's nest in the top of a tree. 'What is the most important Buddhist teaching?' The hermit answered, 'Do no evil, do only good. Purify your heart.' The king had expected to hear a very long explanation. He protested, 'But even a 5-year old child can understand that!' 'Yes,' replied the wise sage, 'but even an 80-year-old man cannot do it.'