There's Something Happening Here

Don't worry about the giraffe

In the cyber world, trends are like quicksilver, a flash, with us one minute and gone the next. They might be as silly as the giraffe on facebook currently wending its way through a cycle (latest response to a silly riddle leading to a lot of giraffe photos - don't ask - is a photo of a giraffe with a knife to its neck, which while it doesn't sound like it, is pretty funny), to Humans of New York, the photo / story project of a man who randomly decided to take photos of people in New York and tell their story.

Fast forward to yesterday. While in a van on his way to do an interview about HONY, he got into a conversation with the driver. The driver and his wife had adopted an Ethiopian girl and now had a brother for her, but not the money for all the processing fees They started a crowd funding project on indiegogo. The story caught the heart of our HONY guy and he told the story. The funding went crazy viral, catching the hearts of people around the world. Yesterday, I spent a little time refreshing the page every few minutes. I watched it leap by hundreds of dollars over a period of about ten minutes. When I last checked before sleep, it was about 65, 000. This morning, it's 75,000. The power of passion, caught in a cyber timeline, for the good of others.

Then there are the Beekman Boys. I'm not sure when I first became aware of the Beekman Boys but it was more than a few years ago. So long ago that it wasn't obvious they were gay back then. Ok, it was obvious to some people, but it wasn't a factor in their story. It was just two guys, one a doctor, one a Martha Stewart magazine guy who bought a farm in upstate New York. They were funny and truthful in their ignorance of much about farming, but they were doing it, one staying in NYC most of the time, working to pay the bills and one on the farm, a clean freak obsessive, who looked about as out of place in farm muck as a pig in a debutante's gown. I was hooked.

photo credit - Beekman 1802

Fast forward to now. They've had a television show, they have a line of products from the farm, they won the Amazing Race. They got married. They are still very funny.

They are also very invested in their small community of Sharon Springs, sharing the wealth their celebrity has brought them, and now, moving farther out into the larger community of the country, they have a project called Beekman 1802 Mortgage Lifter Heirloom Pasta Sauce. There ought to be an acronym for that. If you like Willie Nelson's Farm Aid (Willie's been trending for a long, long time now), you'll like this. The goal is to pay forward what has been given to them and to donate 25% of sales to helping other small farmers pay off their mortgages. For real.

I use these two examples out of more that could be told about because of a few things. The biggest one for me is that when a quicksilver trend goes against the constant flow of selfish garbage we are inundated with daily, against corruption in high places, against the current onslaught of It's All About Me, against cheap tricks in brittle cellophane wrappers, it moves me to a place I want to live in more.

There are so many of us carrying the weight of this world on ourselves like a coating of road dirt; barely knowing it is there anymore until we get caught in a rain shower, jump into the sea, have someone take a cool damp cloth and gently wipe us down and realize the sensation of clean lightness that has been possible the whole time. This isn't quicksilver, it's the real deal.

You don't have to have celebrity to help out another human being. Sure, it helps, but there are people out there doing it every single day, one on one, step by step. Few see them, few hear about them. They and we can't save the world, but we can shine a little light that can be a stretched out hand blinding brightness in the dark for someone else. Yes, it can.

So...that's what I had to say about that!

Have a (un)weighted with windy words Wednesday. Do something winged.