A Box of Thoughts – RFRussell to PEA

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace...”     

                                                                                                    — Jimi Hendrix

Aloha! How’s’it? Good Morning.

It’s been 30 years and then some since I was in this room. Many of you weren’t even born then: amazing. This is an unimagined honor indeed, and one for which I am extremely grateful. You have no idea what’s gone through my head in the last month pondering what would be worth saying to you’all. It has been a great exercise, and I thank you for that. I hope you find the next few minutes worth your while. Fasten your seat belts and I’ll tell you some stories.

Who am I? Richard Russell, born in 1956, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, spent one year at Exeter and graduated in 1975. Today my life is split between Seattle and Hawaii, and I wear many hats. I am a father, life partner/husband, Foundation founder and Trustee, real estate owner/developer, graphic facilitator, artist, musician, producer, cattle rancher, tree farmer, “Inside Passage” boat captain and, I hope, an honest if unorthodox business person.

THEN TO NOW

In June of 1975, I remember being here. We shared an emotional time with friends, played my guitar for services in Phillips Church and elsewhere during graduation week, and enjoyed a good deal of hoopla. Then I remember that the airline destroyed my guitar on the way home: in fact the last music it played was in here. I went on to Stanford and overseas to Europe, and then after graduating in a self-designed major, I settled back in a Northwest chicken coop to make art. Other than a couple of years in London, I’ve been in Seattle ever since. In the last ten years, I’ve been spending more and more time on the big island of Hawaii. We are currently in the process of constructing a carefully designed, self-sufficient ranch home on a mountainside in North Kohala, Hawaii, where we are planning to live next. I like my friend’s statement that one of the purposes of Hawaii is to make everyone the same color.

I was exceptionally lucky to meet a woman who has grown with me and created a new family partnership now spanning 24 years and including our 18 year old son, who is here today.  My son Zac graduated last spring from a “democratic” community school in Seattle. He is here to share this moment with me, and then we will be looking at colleges for him here in the east over the next ten days.

I have had at least three careers so far, and am at a rare point in any life where experience, resources and freedom all converge to create a truly amazing reality. I feel extraordinarily blessed. “You may ask yourself”  to quote David Byrne, “how did I get here?”

I first made a living as a painter, making large oil-on-canvas abstracts that I sold. I began painting due to a great teacher in junior high school in Tacoma, and I was already starting to sell a few things by the time I came back here. For about ten years I painted a lot of commissions and had a few gallery shows. All through that time I really didn’t call myself an artist, though--I was just a painter. I felt it wasn’t my place to make that determination. Now, after all these years, I accept it. These are my 2D children, many still hanging in homes and offices all over the country. Nowadays, though, I think being an artist is more about ideas than a particular medium.

In the late eighties, about the time that galleries began taking commissions greater than 50%, I stopped making “paintings” for money. Through a series of coincidences I was able to switch to the other end of the art spectrum, and learned to produce work that was entirely functional, in service to groups of people. I trained with David Sibbett at the Grove Consultants in San Francisco and then worked as a graphic facilitator and organizational consultant inside of corporations around the Pacific Northwest. I worked with people to focus their thinking and literally develop visions for their work, helping them tell their stories.

I am still doing vision murals today. Here is one in progress for the National Bureau of Asian Research, for example. This is an NGO in Seattle focused on improving the quality of our policies towards Asia. This is their “big picture.” These murals were recently compared to Mayan maps, though I used to call them “cave painting for corporations.” Nowadays in fact they are just very LARGE pictures, usually 12-15 feet long, drawn with felt pens on butcher paper. I get paid the same to do these now as I used to get for oil on canvas paintings!

During the nineties I also worked at my own family’s business, where I engineered and facilitated a redesign of the corporation as well as the articulation of its’ culture, which has more than once been voted one of the best places to work in the country. You may have heard of the Russell Indexes, which was just one of the good ideas that came out of The Frank Russell Company, now called the Russell Investment Group. Frank Russell was my great grandfather, but it was my father George who transformed and built the Company for forty years. I started as a consultant and ended up as the Director of Marketing and Communications during a very exciting period, during which we refined, packaged and sold the Company (an event caused primarily by US tax laws unfavorable to multigenerational family businesses). In the process we created wealth for a lot of people, including everyone who worked for the Company. It remains today one of the leading financial services companies in the world. Here’s an example of our media work from that time,  and allows my dad, who graduated from Exeter in 1949, say hello to you and his dear friends Bob and Gail Bates. (video clip)

After that I helped articulate the founding principles and vision for the family foundation, where many of the assets from the sale went. I continue to serve as a Trustee. The Russell Family Foundation gives away about $5 million a year and is focused on environmental sustainability, helping protect the waters of Puget Sound, as well as developing local leadership and supporting selected issues related to world peace.

I work for myself – and that has worked for me, though it’s not for everyone. At our little shop in West Seattle, called BeachStudio, we make media. I believe trust between people depends on clear and honest communications, including media. Since 1999 I have been producing vision murals, videos, music CDs and other such media for myself and others, usually with the common thread of finding the “big picture” or mapping the larger context, while hopefully also getting an essential story.  

I believe that we human beings don’t utilize our whole bandwidth for communications unless we use pictures. Even the simplest line can cause a conceptual leap for us, accessing a different part of our brains than words do. It doesn’t help that our big brains get so wound up in our words that we forget our other parts, and images open up our larger conceptual capacities. I like to say that if a picture’s worth a thousand words then a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures. In any case, whether in a mural or a polished video program, the big picture thinking helps enlarge our framework and helps hold more perspective for all concerned.

Communication is an art in each of it’s separate forms as well as when you mix all of them together—these days it can be on a cocktail napkin or in an IMAX Theater. One of my core passions has always been music, which I have instinctively kept separate from my day job. On the side, so to speak, I have now made four albums of original songs and a DVD, and I am working on more.  I have the blessing and luxury of working with excellent artists and craftspeople in several disciplines who together, when given the chance, create some exceptional collaborations.

At Beachstudio we also produce videos of interesting and diverse subjects, and I’d like to show you some examples of those. First is a clip from our 16mm movie about natural movement that has come to be regarded as a classic among Feldenkrais practitioners. (video clip)

And now for something completely different. Seattle is famous for it’s music, but not all of it’s best music is well known. Here is an excerpt from a biographical piece we did about Artis the Spoonman, a unique and astounding individual who speaks for himself. We created this video with him, entitled “Not For Sale,” which was actually shot by countless people over a thirty year period in all manner of formats. Here’s a short taste of an American original, a living beat poet. At the end is a bit from the actual recording session of a hit song that you may remember from the radio a couple of years back (Soundgarden "Spoonman"). Last month Artis performed the song with Audioslave in front of thousands. (video clip)

Here is another amazing artist, Dale Chihuly, in a piece we did during the early days of imagining the Glass Museum in Tacoma. (video clip)

Now another change of pace and topic: water. Several of us who call ourselves the Commonicity group recently made this PSA (Public Service Announcement) for television on the subject of water, with the hope of encouraging awareness. (video clip)

Back east here you have places called “Commons”. We don’t have them out west, though we do have National Parks. Because of these historical names here you may be familiar with the concept of a “commons” as a place or set of natural resources that we all share. This is a big deal, actually. In your lifetimes, you will see more and more of this crucial area of our common human interests, which includes the air we breath and the water we drink, become a battleground for both profit and social justice in this country and around the world.

I could show you a lot more but you get the idea. I could never have imagined what has happened since my days here in New Hampshire, and I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone else’s. I do miss a few people, that’s for sure. Appreciate your people; no one knows how long we or they’ve got. In any case, I agree with Elvis Costello: this amazing adventure we are on is “beyond belief.”

AMERICA 2005

Happy as that all sounds, I am very concerned about our country. I do have some suggestions, though I am not running for office. For the record, I belong to neither political party: I have been an Independent since I turned eighteen. It’s exciting to me that we independents (at 38%) are now the largest voting block in the United States, though we aren’t recognized as such as of yet.

Top Ten Things That Would Improve America…If We Could Do Them

1. RE-IMAGINE EDUCATION: This is one of the most important issues for our future. Recently my favorite conversation starter is “let’s try eliminating all private schools.” OK, then eliminate all public schools. The real question is: how do we get everyone back together? If we can’t do that at least we need to make the system more egalitarian and less “class-enforcing”. The old models aren’t working any more. In Seattle we’re watching the private sector punish the school system for failing, after avoiding paying the very taxes for years that might have supported it. It’s painful to watch.

2. RECLAIM OUR ROOTS: Bring back the hairstyles of the founding fathers, as well as other things about them, such as their clear memories of why this country was founded in the first place. I think that the separation of church and state may be the first actual case of intelligent design that I’ve heard about.

3. REQUIRE PERSPECTIVE: Have all 18 year olds either serve somehow (Peace Corps, Americorp, armed forces, etc.) or leave the country for a solid year.

4. REDUCE ORGANIZATIONAL SCALE: I would find a way to disband and reorganize all organizations with more than 300 people to some group less than that number, using a neural network model to distribute people and finances for the same or better results. I’ve heard that "scale" was simply a matter of a few more zeroes, but I don’t agree. I think E.F. Schumacher was right when he wrote that there is a "human" scale to things, and that "small is beautiful."

5. HEALTH SECURITY:  Each of us needs to take responsibility for our own health. Everyone knows that the health care system is broken, but no one knows what to do about it. Here’s a clue: health is actually a community issue, so improving the system requires freeing it from the medical industry. We need to shift the framework in order to change the situation. At the very least we could have universal catastrophic health insurance—a small step we could take towards social justice.

6. EXPAND TRADING SYSTEMS: What if we could solve some of most tenacious issues without using conventional money? We could create and develop complementary currencies to build communities and diversify trading systems. This can occur on many levels, and many of you have already participated in such systems, expanding our notion of wealth and accomplishing impossible feats without conventional money.

7. REVALUE PARENTING: we need to alter the value of that work in our current system, perhaps by establishing a serious tax credit for the parenting function. For example, a parent at home with their children might be given a specific tax credit, equal perhaps to $150 per hour for her time (5x8).

8. ELIMINATE PROHIBITIONS: End all prohibitions for speech, drugs, sex. How many times do we need to learn that prohibition does not work? Eventually the dust will settle, and we will be healthier as a country. The mass-minded mob will have to find something else to do, and the police can focus on more important issues.

9. LIVE ART: Why do we live in a culture where the power of art and music is seriously muted when it’s so vital? Learn to express yourself: the creative process is a natural part of being human, and it’s a wonderful process model for a lifetime.

10. DEMOCRACY: I love this country and I believe this system can work to deliver the promises it carries with it. I believe that if we participate we can change things, and our votes will count. Democracy is a muscle and it atrophies if not used. Participate. Get together with your friends and talk about what’s important. Electing even 10 independents to Congress would change the country.

And, for good measure, number eleven.

11. END CORRUPTION?: This hidden layer of manipulation and extortion is a real threat all over the world. It is truly a global riddle, and solving it could be crucial to actually achieving a peaceful world. Perhaps it could be developed as a national game show of some kind with a lotto-esque reward, with the goal of finding ways to help make corruption rare. If this works, in one way or another, all of us here would likely have to make some kind of sacrifice. Are we willing?

I’m just getting warmed up, so I’ll stop—before I start sounding like I’m ranting. If ever I do, however, I notice that I sound a lot like my grandfather did 40 years ago. Then I think maybe in fact nothing’s changed. Maybe it is a natural aspect of aging. Nevertheless, I know that we can do better, and you young people are what give me hope these days. We need your help.

WARNING: ADVICE AHEAD

(EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT 101)

When I get particularly frustrated I sometimes remember the words of the great biologist Lewis Thomas, who wrote, “statistically, the probability that any of us being here at all is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.”

That being true, I’ve been telling people I want to write a book about disappointment, because it is one of the under-discussed legacies of our American story. If I was a stranger visiting this country I would be alarmed at the ads on television: we’re apparently all either depressed or impotent.  Why so much disappointment? It could only be from misplaced expectations. Why do half the marriages fail?  How are so many misguided expectations planted? Can we—or at least you—do better? Can we learn and change the formula so this doesn’t persist? What expectations should one have for a life in these times?

Here is a  Sufi story I remember. An old woman sits on the road outside her town and greets passing travelers. A man approaches and asks “is there a town up ahead?” to which the woman replies “yes, indeed.” The traveler then asks, “what sort of a town is it?” and the old woman says “what kind of town are you from?” and he replies “it’s a good place, full of wonderful friendly folks.” The old woman said “you will find this town much the same,” and the traveler continued along the road. After a while another traveler approaches and asks the old woman “is there a town near by?” The woman replies, “yes, there is.” The traveller asked, “what kind of town is it?” She asks “what kind of town are you from?” and he replies “it’s a terrible place, full of mean people out for themselves, too crowded, nothing in the stores.”  The old woman said “you will find this town a lot like that.”

Please consider adjusting your expectations periodically. For one thing, I’m sure with a small amount of reflection you can improve their character and usefulness a great deal. Along the same lines, also remember that you never have enough of what you don’t need in the first place. A key question for you to answer as early as possible is: how much is enough for you?  Add to that one other thing I seem to remember—that probably half of what I was taught in school was wrong—and that it was up to me to figure out which was what. It may be the same for you. In my experience you can’t learn everything in one school anyway, and nowadays (thankfully) our educational processes can continue until we die, so I suppose we’re always at the beginning. In Zen Buddhism, certainly, this is the perfect place to be.

I recommend that you make happiness a value. Make and appreciate friends wherever you can. Go deep. Remember Jesus’ underlying message that love IS stronger than fear. Make the practice of compassion a part of excellence. If I’m not mistaken, beauty CAN save the world. And be prepared: Churchill was right when he said “plans are nothing; planning is everything!” In other words, do your homework, but then be awake. Einstein said it beautifully: “imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Remember that fish are largely unaware of the water they swim in. You have the choice to be aware. You live in a very powerful box here at Exeter. It is made up of a long history of experiences, attitudes, assumptions and judgements—both yours and others—which may work for or against you in your life depending on where you play and how you play it. You have been given—and I’m sure earned—a great gift by being here in this environment. You have much to be grateful for: relax and take a deep breath.

In fact, here’s a deceptively simple but effective trick which I learned from the folks at Heartmath in California for whenever you do feel...stressed out. Try breathing through your heart. How about a huge collective sigh? (!) Did you know that your heart has 60 times the electrical power of your brain?

Gather your selves and be ready: you ain’t seen nothing yet. I challenge you to turn this Exeter box inside out, for in truth it’s a box of tools, which you can use in a million ways, most of which you haven’t even imagined yet. One thing I am sure of—it won’t turn out the way you expect. And you won’t always know what tradeoffs you’re really making until it’s too late to change them, so be careful with your commitments and guard your own health and integrity. It is a long movie, but you’re in it! Your life is your canvas - be creative.

I wish you each well, and good luck to us all. Thank you again for giving me this opportunity to speak to you. Have a great life!

God bless and Peace. Namaste.                    

NOTICING THINGS

As you go out, notice the barrel by the door.

It is for whatever you'd like to discard -- those claims

you accepted for a while from someone forceful or loud

but not really your cup of tea, those heavy opinions

balanced on fragile foundations in arguments.

We invite you to retain your tickets for noticing things --

how sunlight is wide and democratic, how the rain

doesn't care who you are, how sounds will follow you home

and become songs that play back whenever you want them to.

A crow, a gull, a foghorn -- keep these for your dreams.

                                    – William Stafford