What do Harvard, Tufts and MIT eco scientists, who also happen to be at the top of this country’s sustainability leaders, get really juiced about when they’re not 24/7 on ground breaking projects? Based on a conversation we all had this week, it’s “weatherization barnraisings” like the ones here in Cambridge where dozens of people decend on someone’s house to do a day blitz of weatherization interventions. In this recipe, the host offers 4 gifts: 1 energy inefficient but actionable house, required materials, pizza and beer. The exciting outcome: people take home enthusiasm for their own possibilities and experience a rich and palpable sense of community based on the sustainability synergy of ideology and pragmatics.

Had a conversation yesterday at the Boston Foundation with brilliant researcher Jessica Martin who works with the ground breaking 300 quality of community indicators. We were talking about the role of narrative, specifically people’s autobiographical stories, in the measurement of community thrivancy.

She suggests that listening to people’s narratives, especially the way they connect, is a powerful way to determine the most important themes to research and measure. “Stories get at the authenticity of experience,” she suggests, giving qualitative data a kind of validity that statistical data might not have.

The high point of the conversation was her talking about “autobiography as activism” which we’ve seen with the Rosa Parks stories and every community’s stories that spark engagement for change. It’s interesting, as counterpoint, that we would hardly talk about “statistical activism.”

In his NY Times essay this week, Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy, Dennis Overbye suggests that science, “which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity.”

He continues to say, “And indeed there is no leader, no grand plan, for this hive. It is in many ways utopian anarchy, a virtual community that lives as much on the Internet and in airport coffee shops as in any one place or time … It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.”

It is no wonder that Obama dedicated some of his inaugural real estate to the re-validation of science, that the Dalai Lama equates the roots of science and Buddhism, and that scientific collaboration across national boundaries is light years ahead of political collaborations between and among countries still laboring in adolescent contentiousness. Just as is so with artists, bloggers, and healers. No wonder indeed.

Cognitive scientist Francisco Varela talks about the evidence we now have that the human brain is a “self-organizing system that works without a director or ’self’.” It’s a scientific validation (more on the intersections of science and democracy here tomorrow) for the thousands of years of Buddhist experience pointing to the same observation and truth.

He suggests this radical realization transforms existential anxiety into an existential peacefulness as we realize that we are this self-organizing, dynamic, and seamlessly interdependent-with-the-world ecosystem. Not only are we certainly not some little parody of the whole, it’s impossible for any kind of director self to exist in a self-organizing system. In this sense, a controlling self is simply a delusion sponsored by the pain body to create the suffering it thinks it needs for evolutionary survival. Radical indeed.

There are two genres of suffering. There is the supplicant suffering that pleads to be spared from itself and the smug suffering that wallows in its righteousness. They are twins of the same mother: a self-serving, pain body commitment to be disinterested in anything joy is interested in.

It’s important to remember that we do things for one reason: to find joy.

It’s particularly important to remember when we’re doing something without joy “in order to get to joy”, which is simply a postponement. The question of joy is not how we can sacrifice in ways that postpones joy, but how we can experience joy in whatever we do now, without postponement.

As I continue to learn the alchemy of cooking, I’m discovering that aside from the classic four tastes of sweet-bitter-sour-salty,  tastes might also be conceptualized in a 3-dimensional model that includes: bright-dark, hot-cool, and sharp-soft. The key is to balance dishes and meals within and across the dimensions.

For example, in Italian cuisines, you have the brightness of basil, sharpness of garlic and cheese, cool of fennel and parsley, hot of chilis and pepper, dark of anchovies, and soft of pastas. Next exploration: the dimensions of balance among textures like crunchy, silky, creamy, chewy …

No degree of imperfection can diminish the beauty of our gifts.

An accidental conversation today with friend Steve who’s expertise is involved in the multi-billion dollar greening of Ohio’s schools. I asked about the future of schools as community centers and he delivered a huge endorsement on the idea that is welcome news in some communities and a radical departure in others.

What it speaks to is an invitation to bring down institutional walls where key community issues like education, health, investments, safety, and employment are not domains “owned” by schools, hospitals, banks, public services and corporations but rather shared across boundaries. Maybe the small acts on this dream are institutional websites that can be designed as more shared spaces across boundaries. We go to one institution’s website and see there live collaborations and exchanges between them and other institutions in the community.

Maybe then we can easily redesign “school” building as “learning” buildings that connect to every other institution in the community.

Talked to my friend Tony Houston tonight about his experience at the inauguration. He was one of so many packed in crowds so dense that at times he couldn’t even raise his hand from his pocket to use his cell phone. Nevertheless, throughout the experience of being a part of the millions there, he reports never hearing anyone raise their voice, speak unkindly or get into a fight. This is the magic of civic behavior in the new day when people who don’t even know each other’s names or stories come together for common purposes.