Poets fight fiercely against the constraints of physics and biology (let’s remember that Dylan Thomas wrote about how we should “rage, rage against the dying of the light) and, on rare occasions, they succeed.  The words of Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca and Robert Frost emanate from their throats and make the earth upon which we stand tremble with their passion; that they are buried deep within that earth only serves to amplify the effect.  And so it is for this reason that I, too, think, and feel, and write, for to take the violent passion that makes my flesh shudder with love and transform it into the sweet music of poetry, of entrepreneurship and of justice, is the greatest of endeavors.

I refuse to act my age.  I vehemently oppose the idea that poverty and pollution are inevitable.  I subscribe to no notion other than that which bends towards Truth.  I laugh at categories, yet categorize all the same.  The words of my elders reach me but do not affect me.  Experts may speak their mind but I mind only the expertise given to me by experience, thinking and practice.  Politicians lay claim to the boundaries of what is possible and attempt to codify it, but when I show my passport to the world it reads only “I belong to no one and everyone.  I do not request passage across your border for I am a force that recognizes no limitations and is unstoppable.” My heart does not beat 60 times per minute: it thunders, it roars, it berates my entire being until I move my arms and my lips in accordance with the rhythm she sets down.  It is not enough to say that I “march to the beat of a different drummer,” for I am the drummer, the beat and the march.

When I was in High School professors would ridicule my idealism and calmly inform me that upon seeing “the real world” I would become more pragmatic, as though the world they live in--one of poverty, disease, war and climate change--is one that I should accept or admire!  Timid, sad souls!  Why should I accept mediocrity just because they have?  Even then I knew that the problem was not with the ideals that I was espousing but rather with the meek people who could not live up to those ideals.  Many are those that can boast of lofty thoughts and feelings, but few--oh, so few!--are those that can pick up those feelings like a sword when the world is swollen with hatred, with obstacles, with hopelessness.  Yet the great men and women of the world have always held fast to their hearts in times of difficulty and, more importantly, shown others that they must do the same.  Great men and women do not tell others what to do, rather, they demand of others that they do what their hearts are asking of them.

What is “the real world,” anyway?  Is it the one in which billions lack access to clean water, health care, shelter and a constant supply of food, while several hundred million waste and over consume all of those?  If so, then I fail to see the wisdom of my professor’s words. In fact, I submit that, to be blunt, my professors were frustrated, idiotic and unimaginative people that were trying to squash the soaring imaginations of the youth that they taught. No!  All progress in history starts with imagination, is carried forward by diligence and dedication and is brought to fruition by inspired action.  I believe that an hour spent daydreaming is more valuable than 100 studying.  Why?  Because though the 100 hours of studying can produce knowledge, the hour of daydreaming can unleash ideas and wisdom, the most valuable of all human tools.  We mustn’t forget that nonviolence is an idea, as is renewable energy, democracy, and even romantic love!  Ideas are what allow us to conceive and create the previously unseen and impossible.  If I had to worship a prophet I would choose, instead of a single person, the generic innovator--anyone who comes up with something new and valuable to the body, the mind, the soul or the world.

That is why I am so ardent a believer in social entrepreneurship as a tool for bettering the world.  One of the most important things to me is the recognition that not only is it inspiring and fulfilling to work on social issues, it is also a hell of a lot of fun.  After all, what could be better than to earn one’s living by improving the lives of others? To apply one’s talents and skills towards solving seemingly intractable problems?  To invent, to invest and to implement?  No longer can we afford to think of the “do-gooder” in terms of Gandhi and Mother Theresa, for that is a model that few can or want to emulate.  But everyone wants financial security for themselves and everyone wants to be engaged in meaningful, exciting and challenging work!  The great challenges of the 21st century call out to us; they ask that more people than ever before become engaged and link up their daily work with their soul work.  The task of earning one’s daily bread must become inextricably linked with the never ending search for meaning and understanding that transpires within the hearts of men and women.

And then there is love.  Not just romantic love, which is celebrated as much in popular culture as it is in literature, but also love for others and the world. Boundless, wild, passionate love.  Agape.  The love that is carried like pollen in the breeze, that brushes our cheeks every time we step outside, that waits for us in the cold of night and greets us through our windows in the morning.  The love that allowed Gandhi to free a nation and Martin Luther King to free a people. The love, as Dante put it, “that moves the sun, the moon and other stars.” This is the love that burns within me; it is a candle whose wax singes my innards and then hardens, forming the architecture of oneness the way that volcanoes create new land.  Love for the downtrodden and the privileged.  Love for the bird that sings and the hunter who silences the bird.

There is a great Tibetan saying: “do not hate the person that hates; hate hatred.” Recognize that within all of us there lies the potential to do good and to do bad, and that the line between the two is often as murky as a stagnant pond.  Reality calls us on to be compassionate.  We must work in violent opposition to injustice in the world while also understanding that we, too, are unjust.  Knowing this, Jesus preached the wisdom of nonviolence and non judgement.  Gandhi once said that “if Christians really practiced Christianity (loving your neighbor as yourself, turning the other cheek, basically following the Sermon on the Mount) then all the world would gladly be Christian.”

Great things await us.  But they do not wait forever.  We must forever let them know that we are on the way.  We must seek inspiration and inspire seekers.  We must love one another so thoroughly that like a great river, we overflow and let that love spill forth upon our surroundings. In short, we must so thoroughly and completely allow ourselves to be who we are that we thoroughly and completely change the world.

Literary Portrait of Andy Posner
Standing in the narrow, creaking stairwell of the Urban Environmental Lab at Brown University, Andy Posner talks animatedly with two fellow Environmental Studies master’s students.  His engaged, clean-shaven face tilts instinctively toward the center of the group and his bright yellow messenger bag quivers in rhythm with the enthusiastic movement of his hands. Tomorrow, Andy tells them, he’s going to see Muhammad Yunus speak at a conference in Boston. His classmates smile knowingly. Yunus – a Bangladeshi economics professor who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his group-lending microfinance model – is exactly the type of public figure that one would expect to lend inspiration for Andy’s growing environmental services company: the Capital Good Group, Inc. An important part of this socially minded company, the Capital Good Fund, after all, is modeled after Yunus’s Grameen Bank and will bring financial services to low-income residents of Providence, RI. He’s excited, they can tell, even as he apologetically backs away from the conversation, barely in time for a meeting with an undergraduate waiting in a the conference room across the hall.

Andy has two states of mind. “I’m like this, literally,” he says, “I would say 85% of the time. Pumped up, inspired, talking about making things happen. And the other 15% – profoundly depressed. And there’s no middle ground.” However, the division between these two states of mind has not always been so glaringly uneven – in the past, Andy promises, he was just 40% inspired and 60% depressed. “Until I was in tenth grade,” he remembers, “I was on this conveyer belt.” As the only son of two well-educated, Jewish parents, for a long time Andy felt that his monotonous private school education would inevitably lead to medical school. However, after taking a 10th grade romantic philosophy and poetry class in which he read Allen Watts’ The Way of Zen and works by Joseph Campbell, Andy made the decision to leave his private high school – for public school, as a compromise instead of completely dropping out – in order to focus on becoming a professional tennis player. “I was really talented,” he recalls, “and that was the only place I could think of to put that desire for greatness.”

After high school, Andy “begrudgingly” became an undergraduate at California State University Northridge. In 2003, Andy’s growing interest in social issues led him to attend a protest against the war in Iraq. Shouts of “No war for oil!” rang in his head, over and over again. After the protest, Andy started the car that he had borrowed from his parents and suddenly realized, “Wait a minute! If I don’t want to have a war for oil, why don’t I stop driving?” So he did. With the money earned by selling his tennis rackets, Andy bought a bike that would take him on pavement and pathways through LA neighborhoods, rather than on highways that cut through and ascended above them. Biking in the open air allowed Andy to experience – smell, taste, hear – real communities in a wholly different, fascinating manner from driving. Save a few rental cars, he has not driven since.

It was a bicycle accident, just months later, that led to what Andy calls his “moment of commitment.” As the bombs began to fall in Iraq, Andy sought to calm his nerves about a speech he was to give on non-violence in his public speaking class by going on a bike ride. While going down a hill at 40 mph, he hit a pothole that catapulted him fifteen feet and gave him a level 2 concussion, a broken collarbone, and amnesia for five hours. For the next few days, while recovering in bed, Andy’s thoughts were far from the speech that he’d been unable to give. Acutely aware that the bombing had started, he remembers, “I just had this sense that as long as there were people in the world suffering, I couldn’t just go about my life as if that didn’t exist.”

With his bike helmet always at the ready, Andy has long since stepped off the medical school-bound conveyor belt that his parents had set out for him at an early age. Since then, Andy has spent two years in Spain living out his “Ghandi phase,” fasting occasionally and wearing one of his two all-white organic cotton outfits and handmade leather shoes, and another two-and-a-half months biking 3,800 miles across the United States while camping out in peoples yards. “I have always thought – or known – that I would start something and do something of great import,” Andy reflects, “but I never knew what that would be.”
In the spring of 2007, after graduating from CSUN, Andy spent a month in Cairo working with a non-profit, Solar Cities, that was founded by his good friend and colleague to teach the Zabbaleen – Egyptian Arabic for “garbage people” – to build their own solar water heaters and biogas generators out of materials that they find in landfills. While retaining his role as a board member at Solar Cities, Andy is in his second and final year as a master’s student at Brown. Today, he is armed with a business suit, a pair of organic cotton jeans, a collection of bicycles equipped for any imaginable transportation situation, and an iPhone in a thick rubber case fit for a demolition site. Andy is well known in the Brown and Providence communities as the co-founder and vivacious face of the Capital Good Group, Inc. This environmental services company comprises a family of consulting, microfinance, and other business endeavors, and is the culmination of Andy’s ideas and goals of changing the world by changing the way in which wealth is generated.

Working with Brown University students and faculty, who marvel at his constant state of intensity and power to inspire others, Andy has created a buzz on campus about the Capital Good Fund, particularly the microfinance initiative, which will kick off in February 2009 and has already raised $11,000 for short term loans of $500-$3,000. Anyone who applies for a loan is required to undergo a credit check as well as a character assessment, business plan evaluation, and must answer questions about how the loan will benefit his or her family. The Capital Good Fund looks for “a certain desperation, a certain ‘I’m doing this for my family and I’m gonna do whatever it takes to repay this so I can get another loan that benefits my family’” says Andy. These loans can finance very simple and practical endeavors, such as the cost of obtaining licenses for a home daycare business that will allow it to become an official legal entity. It seems to resonate with people that Capital Good is doing something innovative.

“He thrives on ideas and inspiration,” says Rachel Katz, an undergraduate who met Andy through a social entrepreneurship class and is working with him on a home weatherization financing model that is part of the Capital Good Group. “I always seek something that’s epic,” Andy agrees, admitting he doesn’t know much about banking despite wanting to start an investment fund. “I’m initially more interested in the audacity of it and the feeling associated with it, and then it becomes goal-oriented, and then it becomes practical…it’s that certain epic, mythological quality to it, that I’m participating in some cosmic drama in which it’s light versus darkness, that I’m an actor in this – that my actions are somehow reordering the nature of things.”

Andy intends to leverage the strength of Muhammed Yunus’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Grameen Bank microcredit model, which was initially derided by large banks, to bring social and environmental benefits to the Providence community. Andy loves this story. “The whole thing is a fuck-you to the banking industry,” he says, “Everything [Yunus] does is the antithesis to what banks do. And I love stuff like that, because practically, it works, and it makes sense, but also there’s a narrative there – that fuck-you attitude to people who are doing things away and don’t want to change.” Where Yunus argues that access to credit should be a fundamental human right, Andy answers that “access to information should be a fundamental human right.” iPhones, for example, are often seen as just a neat business gadget. Andy uses his to listen to audiobooks by Thoreau, Van Jones, and Dostoevsky while biking. More importantly, however, he views iPhones as a tool to save the world, because “with information I can do all sorts of things. One of my frustrations is that people don’t view every piece of new technology as a potential tool for saving the world.”

Because he spends a lot of time daydreaming, Andy considers himself to be a highly inefficient person. However, “when I do work,” he says, “I can write ten pages in one hour, and read very fast, and assimilate a lot of information very fast.” With a resume that consists of two months as a luggage salesman and just two weeks as a bicycle messenger on a Paramount Pictures studio lot, Andy knows that his ultimate success will be – must be – built on the strength of his passion, his charisma, and his ideas. It will also be built on his commitment to developing a business model that does not gallantly forgo economic profit to further social and environmental causes. Andy and his team are not “pie in the sky, granola-eating liberals. Well, we are liberals,” he admits, “but not granola-eating.”

But above all else, what stood out to me about Dr. King as I listened to his voice bellow from the past and pursue the future was the extent to which his entire mental and physical life was absorbed by the pursuit of justice.  Long before he died at the hands of an assassin he had given up his life to his cause, and I began thinking about my own life, my own pursuits.

I often feel that there is a kind of inevitability to what I do, that though on a day-to-day basis I freely make choices that decide the effectiveness with which I implement my dreams, over the long run there is a nagging feeling that I cannot but help achieving my aims for a better, more prosperous and more peaceful world.  I have always felt that I would do those things with my life, and even though I often doubt myself, even though I often waver and temporarily give up, I utterly incapable of being anything but devoted to what I am doing.  These thoughts often teeter on the concept of predestination, a concept that I found repugnant and distasteful.  In short, I want to know that If I accomplish something it is because of the choices and decisions that I made, and not simply because I was meant to do it all along.  On the other hand, I can’t fully accept the notion that I am acting freely, for I feel a kind of inner fire compelling me to act, forcing me to move forward.  Granted, that fire is inner--the flame is kept and maintained by myself and none other--yet still do the doubts linger. I have yet to fully and satisfactorily resolve this question. In effect, I am asking the same question as Tolstoy in War and Peace: what is the role of the individual in history? I ardently want to believe that great individuals shape history, yet in my heart I know it is nowhere near that simple.

And while I continue with these thoughts, other exciting things are happening.  My dad came out last week to look at condos in Providence, and we are close to making a bid.  My plan is to put solar panels (i’ve taken to calling them solar poetry) on the roof of the condo, and that, more than anything, thrills me to no end.  At the same time, The Capital Good Fund just released the immigration loan applications into the community, and The Capital Good Group, Inc. is working hard to develop a proposal for creating a revolving loan fund for energy efficiency out of the Federal Stimulus Funds.  In addition, The Capital Good Fund is now officially incorporated as a non-profit in the State of Rhode Island, and we also have found a pro-bono consulting partner--Minimax Consulting--that is going to help us with data management and analysis, and feature us on their web site!

In short, things are moving quickly and in an exciting manner.  The first draft of my masters thesis is due in 1 month.  The Capital Good Fund should make its first loans within that time period, and The Capital Good Group may get its first big job as well.  Web sites for both organizations are currently being developed. Yet as all these things happen, once again, I inevitably return to the question of my role in all of them: am I making things happen through some wise choice or decision to work hard, or simply because I am meant to be doing these things?  Or does it feel inevitable because I enjoy doing this work so much, yet in reality it is all about me doing things that I didn’t have to do?  For some reason, these questions are plaguing me more than words can describe.  I feel that somewhere buried in all these musings is a profound realization about the nature of life and the universe. I could easily write it off as mindless mental chatter, but something tells me I’m on the trail of a profound realization, the implications of which I may not fully understand or like.

Nevertheless, I have always said that my primary pursuit in life is the pursuit of Truth, and the thing about the Truth is that we can avoid it or accept it, but it’s always there, lurking, waiting for us to awaken. So If I catch up with the answer to this rather elusive question, then it will be a chance for me to test my devotion to internal revelation by accepting, rather than rationalizing, what I find.  If I am able to do that with a fraction of the things in my life--in short, if I am able to be honest with myself--then when I die it will be said of me that I lead a good and passionate life, and I will be proud of my life’s work.  Oh, to leave a mark on history, that is the most powerful of statements to make with the hours, seconds and breaths that one has alloted to one for living.  May these keystrokes, these breaths, and these moments be as notches on the tree of history, twinkles in the starlight that illuminates poetry, mythology, religion and politics, etc.  . . 

This New Year, let us commit to a shared responsibility. Let us recognize that if little girls in Afghanistan die while in school, then little girls in America will inherit a world that has lost their beauty, their ideas, their hope.  Let us recognize that where we can we must act and where we cannot we must seek ideas, pressure others, and demand an end to injustice wherever it transpires.  The global economic crisis is yet another sign of the way in which a few selfish people--Wall St. bankers, lax regulators--can cause untold suffering.  But every day the decisions we make have repercussions around the world, like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings that creates a ripple of air that leads to a hurricane.  We cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend this is not the case.  Let that be our New Year’s resolution. 

Read on for a poem I wrote on this matter during the run up to the war in Iraq.

The Human Race

Who doesn’t want peace?
Who doesn’t prefer
A white jasmine wind,
Or an amber dawn
To the black unveiling
of bombs?
Who doesn’t love to love
And be loved by saline lips?

We are strong as magnets:
In order to hold together
We divide until a no-man’s land
Fuses our disarray,
And to surrender to the center
Is to die.

Who doesn’t want peace?

We disagree, opine, demonstrate,
Raise arms, palms, prayers, shouts--
We agree, unite, stare off into discontent,
Drop bombs, flags, clothes, lies and truths.

And now I ask you, as a poet
Caught between your truth
And my truth, my lies
And your lies,
What will become of my poems
After we damn the last river,
Destroy the last forest,
Culture, life?
Who will read my work
When the last soldier dies
In the name of peace?
What will happen to
Our disagreement
If mankind kills itself?

When all was said and done,
Who did not want peace?

monday, march 23rd, 2003

As the years wore on and my knowledge of past, present and future deepened, I felt my love of things grow, mature, and change.  I came to see a gaping wound throughout all of life, a kind of primordial sadness born of the pain of birth, the struggles of existence, and the terror of death, and tears would spill from my heart at the thought of how beautiful, how ugly, the world can be.  These contradictions would elicit, not disdain, not disgust, but rather compassion and love--pure, unadulterated love for the whirling ball we call the Earth.

The more I learned about philosophy, science, religion, history, mythology, poetry, athletics, the more my heart pounded in my chest with a ferocious yearning.  Sugary blood circulated through my veins.  Greatness beckoned me like the archetype of a beautiful woman--greatness defined not by personal achievement and advancement, but rather a dogged pursuit of the themes that undergird humanity: the search for Truth, the struggle for goodness, the need for understanding, the fight against evil, and so on.

I am now a young man of 24.  I have arrived at this point after much struggle, much doubt and much joy.  I have become so completely enamored of every drop of existence that, though I often feel an immense and pervasive sadness, I viscerally understand the Arabic saying that “a sack of sugar must be sliced open that the sweetness may spill forth.” I delight in shirking my duties in order to luxuriate in the mystery and wonder that surrounds my skin like a shawl made of dew and sunlight, and I open my heart to the entire gradation of color and music that makes up a lifetime.

So despite the injustice and the global challenges that humanity faces, I refuse to despair.  I believe the best way to evoke the best in others is to believe in the ability of others to be great.  This is what made Gandhi successful where others failed.  It is an unwavering belief in the fundamental goodness and kindness of people, a love for the world upon which so many varied and unique stories take place.  I view it as my life’s mission to tend that stage, to make of my life a profound story about “the love that moves the sun, the moon and other stars.”

I conclude with a poem of mine, and then with several love poems from the great 13th century Sufi poet Rumi:

Love Eternal

Love eternal cannot be had;
All things grasped will be unclasped
Like hands that lose their early might.
Love eternal cannot be seen;
All sunsets fade away
And even eyes, in death, decay.
Love eternal can only pass
Like a migrant bird: the trackless
Tracks upon the sky.
--Andy Posner
Wednesday, November 17th, 2002: 3:00 P.M.
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Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity.
The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death.
Tomorrow, when resurrection comes,
The heart that is not in love will fail the test.
--Rumi
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The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere,
they’re in each other all along.
--Rumi
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