I spent a day with Wes Nisker once, up at Spirit Rock, where he is a Buddhist meditation teacher. It was a great experience, but nothing like his opening remarks tonight at the YJ Conference, in which he did a veritable stand-up routine (with a mindfulness bent, of course). Wes' teachings tonight focused on our evolution on the planet; he took us on a journey from the big bang to now, when we are living at a moment of great fortune, but are still unhappy. "In the beginning, there was nothing," he says. "And it was good."

Wes' general message was that we need a sort of devolution; we need to actually work less, make less stuff, consume less, and, as a nation, step down from our former title as world superpower. Here was the big surprise for me: Wes performed (yes, performed!) two song-and-dance numbers. The first was called the "Subatomic Shuffle," (the "ultimate be-bop, to be or not-to-be-bop"), and the second was called "Get off the Wheel" (which was about how we try to be everything, from a golfer to a rolfer, and kind of miss the point).

There were a lot of great lines in his talk, but one of my favorites was when he talked about the creator of humanity as "the artist formerly known as God." Hilarious.

Did anyone else catch the opening remarks?

Posted by Karen Macklin on January 16, 2009 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)