blog019 Working For A Better World

Window Washer courtesy of www.eurocheapo.com

The alarm woke me up this morning in the middle of a dream. I was in an American suburb, brown wooden houses close packed into rolling hills under a California blue sky, perhaps near San Francisco. It was late morning. No cars passed. I was standing at a T intersection with Marion and Wolfgang K. We had just asked a tall, energetic, short-haired man in his early thirties for directions. After he gave us clear instructions I asked him, What are you doing home at this hour of the day? He answered, All my contracts have been cancelled! The economy is so bad I'm out of work. His anger and frustration came out as a giant sweeping gesture. All I want to is to be out there washing windows! He makes the sound of a rubber squeegy scraping across wet glass.

My mouth starts speaking before I know what I will say. We are Possibilitators. We work for a better world. We are going to do for you right now exactly what we are going to suggest that you start doing for others, which is, to stop working for money and start working for a better world. We are going to provide you with our Possibilitator services for free, right now, for the joy of creatively collaborating with you. We know from experience that when we provide you with our services something interesting will happen. Maybe not instantly, maybe not directly, but by providing you with these services something good will come of it. Together we will have made a little bit of a better world.

Here is our suggestion. Get your gear together now and go out there and do what you came here to do, what you love to do. Get out there and wash windows. Choose some windows to wash, knock on the door, tell them you are washing windows for a better world. Tell them your profession is to create clarity and openness and light for people. Then get washing. Do a good job, always adding something a little extra: tighten a few screws on a loose hinge, pick up some garbage, pull some weeds, something like that. As you pack up to move to the next location leave your card. It says your name, telephone, email, website, and the following words: I work for a better world. If you know anyone else who could use a little clarity and freshness and light please call or write me. I will get right on it. If you have a little extra food, that you would like to give me so I can keep working for a bettter world, I thank you. I love my work. I'll write that down for you.

Now, I continued, do you know someone else who could use some possibility from us? He thinks for a moment then says, Come inside. We step into his garage that he converted to an office because he uses bicycles for transportation for his wife and child. The office is full of clean windows. On a large cork board on the office wall is an irregularly shaped poster cut-out with a dark green border. It is a photo of an undaunted American Indian chief in fine beadworked leather and eagle-feathered headdress, facing a crowd of onlookers. Just in front of him, first in the crowd, stands Lee Lozowick, blue long-sleeve shirt, a full head of silver dreadlocks, serenely connected with and somehow befriended with the Indian chief, who now resembles a combination of Arnaud Desjardins and Yogi Ramsuratkumar.

I point to Lee and exclaim to our window-washer friend, Do you know who that is? Do you know this man? He doesn't seem to know, or at the moment won't say. Next to this photo is a smaller cut-out from the same larger mural, also outlined in green, a closeup of more members of the crowd at the same gathering. Clearly visible in the crowd is Dasya, another student of Lee Lozowick. I look at Marion and Wolfgang mutually acknowledging that by encouraging the window washer to work for a better world instead of for money, something interesting certainly did happen. And then the alarm goes off.