What Matters Most    Laughter fills the room where four generations of women gather together: mother, daughter, granddaughter and great granddaughters.   They share the same twinkle in their eyes, wisdom and sense of humor.

Sharon Sand speaks plainly and simply about their relationship.  “I think that women are incredily strong, and I think that women are the glue that hold things together because as part of our nature we see things from a more global  perspective.  We see how a situation or an event is going to ripple out into the family, how everyone is affected.”

At this particular point in American history, Sharon believes that women make a significant difference.  “I think women are really important right now because I think the global view actually goes out beyond our families to seeing from a different perspective.

“The one thing we have as part of our nature is our nuture and that compassion.  So, I think that women, right now, are really going to have much more influence because we can’t muscle our way through things anymore.

“I think that the world has been driven by a masculine energy for thousands of years.  Now is the time when the feminine energy is going to make the difference.  Women are very good at compromise.  Very very good at compromise.  And, I think that anything we care about, we think about it, and we think about whatever it happens to be, whether it’s something personal, how that’s going to play out and affect others that are around us.

“Not from a place of needing to take care of everyone but just from a consciousness.  The world, right now, really needs that feminine energy, not just within our families. 

“I mean, ‘Who makes things okay?’  When momma’s not okay, nobody’s okay.  So, momma does it!

“And, within my family of the four generations, the women in my family are very strong women.  We’re just more of a stabilizing force.   I love the relationship that we have…four generations of women.”

Collaboration and Communication

The four generatons of women–mother, daughter, granddaughter and great granddaughters–know how to get along with others and each other.  “For Page, she just really loves people.  And, she’ll say, ‘Well, that person was mean to me but they’re probably having a bad day.’ 

“It’s not that she doesn’t come into conflict.  She does.  But, I think that there’s a lot of allowance for allowing people to be who they are.

“Some days we’re on and some days we’re not, and some days we’re bitchy and some days we’re not and some days we’re more caring and more thoughtful and some days we’re not.   And, so it’s just an allowance for the humanness.

“We have a tendency to want go to that place if somebody’s rude to us, there must be something wrong with me.  I don’t think that Page takes that on that way.  And, I know that Hannah doesn’t, either.  I think there’s just this solidness in them. 

“I think they choose also how much they’re going to participate with someone.  Shannon used to say this to them when they were really, really little and complain when playing and say, ‘So and so did this to me!’ or ‘So and so did that to me!’

“Shannon would say to them, ‘Hannah, you’re a sovereign nation.  They can’t make you do anything.  They can’t make you feel any way.  You are a sovereign nation, so you get to choose how much you’re willing to take on or how much you’re willing to participate.  If that person is mean to you in some way or it’s just not fun to play with them because you have to play with them in whatever they want to do, you get to choose.  But then, you can’t complain.’

“So, I think that there’s a self-responsiblity there as far as how much you’re going to allow someone else to affect how you feel.  And, I’d always love that when Shannon would do that, she’d say, ‘Page, you’re a sovereign nation.’  And, both of them do have this very strong sense of self.”

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Coming from a Place of Abundance

Great granddaughters, Page and Hannah are teenagers.  Granddaughter Shannon is in her mid-thirties.  Sharon is sixty-two.   Sharon’s mother is eighty-five.  Their ability to share their thoughts and feelings with one another is the foundation of their strength. 

“When we are all together, eventhough Hannah is seventeen and Page is thirteen, my mother being eighty-five, we just have fun. 

“They can talk to my mom in the same way they would talk to me or they can talk to their mom or they can talk to a friend and so there’s just a connection that is a camaraderie whenever we get together to do something. 

“My mom listens to what they have to say.  She’s not caught in the mindset of the time in which she grew up.  I think my mother’s values were always very different than what society’s values were portrayed. 

“I can remember when she was on strike in the fifties working at Boeing, coming home from school and seeing commodities on the kitchen table, and it was like, ‘Whoa!’ 

“And, I said to her, ‘Are we poor?’  And she said, ‘No, that’s a mindset.’

“The values she gave to me, that I gave to Shannon, that my daughter gave to her daughters, is that you can come from a place of lack or you can come from a place of abundance and it doesn’t have anything to do with what you may have acquired in your life.  It’s an energy, it’s a feeling.  That’s what my mother gave to us, and we didn’t grow up with a lot, that’s for sure.  But, we were happy.  We were happy.

“We can’t get that from someone else.  We can only get it from ourselves.  But, our families can help us to belong because we do belong to our families no matter how diverse and different we may be, we belong.  That’s what we have those families for.

“No matter where they go, no matter what they do, they always have someone to come home to and that’s generationally.

“If I”m gone tomorrow, they have their mother.  They have their great-grandmother.  If their mother’s gone tomorrow, they have me and they have my mother. 

“But, most of all they have themselves.”

What Matters Most     Dave Bonta is quick to point out that all earthly energy is solar originated in its basis.

“Wind energy is really just the thermal nature of the air currents moving across the earth based on thermals from the heating and cooling of the earth.  Tide energy rolling across the earth is also a form of solar energy, as geothermal is.  All energy, even biomass, is based on solar energy.  And, all of that is renewable since the sun should last millions and millions and millions of years as a dependable resource.

“Fossil energy is actually solar based, too.  Coal, oil and gas are all based in sunshine.”

Although the basis of all energy may be solar, the difference is what energy sources are renewable and what energy sources are nonrenewable.  Renewable include photovoltaic (PV), thermal, wind, geothermal, biomass, hydropower and tidal currents.  Nonrenewable include oil, natural gas, propane, coal and uranium.

What distinguishes renewable from nonrenewable is the amount of time it takes to replenish the energy source.  The nonrenewable sources were formed long ago during earth’s development.  Their supplies are limited.  The renewable sources are replenished in a very short time.  Day after day, the sun shines, the wind blows and the rivers and tides flow.

Carbon-loading of the atmosphere

Dave stresses, “The difference between the two is that renewable energy typically doesn’t increase the carbon-loading of the atmosphere.  It’s carbon neutral.  It’s based on recently sequestered carbon.  It’s not using fossil carbon, carbon that was sequestered years and years and millions of years ago and now being re-released in the form of emissions.

“The difference between a nuclear plant and a solar panel really has to do more with the fact that the solar panel can be renewed.  The energy comes in daily.  The nuclear plant is a finite resource in that the uranium has got to be mined, and it has to be processed, and it has to be sequestered somewhere after it’s been used.  As a waste product, it has to be dealt with.  The solar and the other renewable sources don’t really have those issues.

“When we’re talking about biomass carbon as opposed to fossil carbon,” this is the distinguishing factor, “because that applies to carbon dioxide generation.  And carbon dioxide generation, as you know, creates the blanketing of green house gases that helps to create the green house effect and that’s where the global warming comes from.

“So, when we burn a product like a piece of wood, and we burn it in such a way that it’s releasing carbon, that’s recently sequestered carbon.  That piece of wood is fifty or sixty years old but the carbon was in our recent history.  Carbon that’s coming out of the coal or out of the oil or out of natural gas was sequestered millions of years ago when the atmosphere was different, when it was heavy with carbon.

“And, now by burning those things and re-releasing the carbon from those older, fossilized products, it’s like sticking a straw in the earth and pumping the carbon right back into the atmosphere and recreating an atmosphere that we can’t live with, that life can’t survive with.

“The difference is extremely important.  Yes, all energy is solar based but the difference is what the energy release does to our atmosphere.

“It’s really important if we’re going to start to look at renewable and sustainable solar energies, we keep mindful of the differences, and one of those big differences is carbon.”

Steve Snyder adds, “And, another thing, the difference of renewable, the basis of it, it will always be there, the sun for the next six billion years will always be there, the wind will always be there. 

“But, even if uranium and nuclear power plants were renewable energy, they would not be sustainable because you would always have the waste.  You cannot sustain that type of energy in the long term because eventually the amount of hazard you create and potential danger there, you could not sustain that over the long term.

“If there was an endless supply of oil, if there was an endless supply of coal, the use of those would not be sustainable because it would eventually negatively impact the environment and our lifestyle to such a degree that we could no longer use them.”

“It’s one of the basics,” continues Dave.  “Once we’ve been able to explain that to people, they have that ‘Aha’ moment.”

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Sustainable Living: A New Set of Values

If we want to create a sustainable house, then we need to start by re-creating the not so big life.  This is a value issue.  It doesn’t belong to the building industry.  We need to take responsibility for our level of consumption.

Steve begins, “Dave and I are perfect examples of opposite ends of the spectrum.  My wife and I live in a 200-year-old farmhouse.  He lives in a house that he and his wife knew all this information and they started from the ground up and they did everything right to start with.

“My wife and I, we changed our light bulbs.  We put up storm windows.  We blew in cellulose insulation, changed our appliances.  Efficiency and conservation is built-up.  There’s two different ways you can go at it, I went one direction, and he went the other because I moved into an old farmhouse and had to do these things.

“So, there’s lots of ways to do it and solar systems are very scaleable.  We’re hoping we can show there’s nothing to be afraid of.  You can do it little by little or you can go whole hog and start from the beginning and do everything right from day one.”

There are challenges, however, facing the value shift to renewable and sustainable green solutions.  There seems to be three main prejudices.

Dave explains, “It’s a sense that this stuff is just too expensive, it can’t be afforded.  The only way it makes any sense that anybody could ever buy it is if the government hands out checks.  That’s a prejudice that goes back to the first solar dawn back in the early 80’s.

“The other prejudices have to do with whether or not solar actually works, whether or not the technology is good enough to actually replace fossil fuel.  People hear that a solar panel is a 14-15% efficiency, they say, ‘My electric heater is 100% efficient.’ So, when you start to look at things like that, it makes it a more difficult challenge.

“It’s true that solar panels don’t have much more than a 14 or 15% efficiency in most cases but the resource that you’re drawing from is unlimited.  And so, even if it’s only 5 or 10%, it’s still cumulatively a huge amount of power that can come down and be captured.”

“And, it’s free power,” Steve adds.

“Yeah, it’s free power once the initial investment is made,” confirms Dave.

“The other prejudice against solar is it’s bone ugly.  And that was, again, part of the first dawn of solar when a lot of folks got into the business and started hanging all kinds of things off houses that looked like Coney Island.

“In a lot of cases, the people who were doing this were into it for the government incentive checks.  As soon as the government incentive checks stopped coming, they went out of business promptly and they left a lot of junk on people’s roofs.  After a couple years, it quit working and the people were left with a bad taste in their mouth about whether solar really works or can work.

“So, those are the three prejudices we have to combat.”

Dave concludes, “Solar and green, they are beautiful and they can be worked into a design for any home and to be elegant and be lovely all for themselves.

“The other thing that we’re trying to say is that it is affordable.  Now, certainly government incentives help.  And, there’s going to be, I suppose, under this new administration what they’re calling a ‘New Green Deal.’  And, they’re going to be putting money into our infrastructure.  That’s fantastic!  That’s exactly what we need to do and I’m happy to see that come and, naturally, we support that.

“But, the other thing is the fact of whether or not it actually works.  It will work, it works splendidly but it’s all a question of re-sizing our demand.

“If we want to keep using at 40 or 50 or 60 kilowatt hours a day….if we want to keep heating the night sky by not insulating our homes or windows….if we want to maintain wasteful habits of driving giant, giant cars around that suck up 6 miles of gas for every mile….if we want to do those kind of things then no amount of energy is enough.

“We have to start to look at what we actually use and once we look at our demand, and once we look at our load, then it’s easy to come up with an affordable and sensible answer to that.  And then, we can make that beautiful and we can also make that affordable.

“So, those are the three things we’re asked to do.  When most people come to understand that they’re wasting more power than they’re actually using, then they say, ‘Gee, what can I do about that?’  Well, ‘Thank You,’ that’s the right question.  We can help you answer that question.”

What Matters Most    Divorce is devastating, never easy.  To all outward appearances,  Jill Butler had a wonderful life but sometimes things are not what they seem to be.

In the middle of marriage, Jill stepped back, saying to herself, “This is not who I want to be.”

She had grown comfortable with an affluent lifestyle, what she calls her “addiction to the checkbook.”  She knew, however, if she left her marriage she’d need to reinvent herself and support herself once again.  After ten years of marriage, it took another six years for Jill to regain her confidence before she could return to single life.

Although the affluence afforded her privilege and convenience, what she experienced in her marriage was “…a lifestyle and a culture of arrogance and needing to own whatever was around.  [My husband] was a man who wanted to own me.  So, his behavior was very controlling in this very beautiful lifestyle.”  Very slowly, Butler became a person she didn’t like: “…very demanding, very arrogant and a little bit snippy.”

The story of Butler’s transformation is chronicled in her book, Create the Space You Deserve.  The best that Jill deserved didn’t revolve around an affluent lifestyle.  The best she could give herself was the opportunity to create new ideas and share with others.  According to Butler, marriage “…was not an environment that would allow me to do that because [my husband] had a script that was not my script.”

What triggered Butler’s decision to marry had been a tanking economy in the early 1980s, and she got scared.  It was the fear factor of a poor economy that caused her to go “under the umbrella” of an affluent marriage.

She found journal writing as a means to get her emotions out in front of her, acknowledging ideas and feelings.  It also opened the way to Create the Space You Deserve.  Personal journal writing became Butler’s outlet for having a conversation with her self about transforming her life.

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 Walking as Therapy

Jill believes that sometimes we talk too much to others about our problems.  We need to take a deep breath, sit and be quiet.  “Get off the media.  Get off the cell phones.  Get off the music, the television and the internet.  Listen to the silent voice within,” says Butler.

Jill continues, “We know it all.  We know the answers to all of this already.  But the world, and we who are attached to it and actually hooked on it, haven’t learned to step back.  What matters is the picture we see for ourselves.  What’s the languaging we want to hear?  What do we already know?”

Jill’s advice?  Sit in meditation.  Take a walk in nature.  No media.  No cell phone.

What Butler finds interesting about walking is “…in the body, there are answers to everything.  When we move-walk, swim, dance-all of those answers is released.  But, if we’re plugged in, there’s already too much static, we’ll never hear it.”

We need to identify when we’re inside an emotional hole and recognize that we’re inside that hole.  If we can’t do it alone, then we need to find a professional who can help us address the issue, either in therapy or with someone who is actually going to point out the real issue, not discuss the issue in idle chit chat that becomes a pity party.

“The moment of greatest learning is when we’re inside this great big hole,” offers Jill.  “When we don’t know where we’re going, it’s an opportunity to choose again, to choose anew.  If we dare go in there, be quiet and take the walk that allows us to hear nature or hear ourselves think, then we get disconnected from everybody else’s message.”

Butler encourages us to look inside ourselves for answers.  Engage the world then go back inside yourself.  Quietly.  Write it down.  See what you’ve written, see how you feel.  “Sometimes we don’t even know how we feel.  We’re racing.  We’re in our cars, running to dinner, we’re working, we’re so important…we’re on the internet, we’re calling.

“It becomes a luxury to literally do nothing.  Sitting and looking out the window at the void,” as she calls it, is one of her greatest sources of inspiration.  “There’s no agenda.  We’re not looking for anything.  We’re open.  We need to take the time to step away from our busy lives, look into the nothingness and find balance.”

Experiential Learning

Jill is extremely aware of life as the ultimate school.  Butler is interested in the whole package, the combination of the emotional, the mental and the physical.  She claims, “Everything I’ve gained is a result of my willingness to walk into the unknown.”

Even though her marriage didn’t work out, she’d never trade it for anything else.  Jill has learned a new emotional vocabulary, a new emotional aesthetic, and writing more than ever before.  She inspires others to “create their own vision” by sharing with them what she found useful as she walked her own pathway.

What is to be admired about Jill Butler is how she trusts the process offered through experiential learning.  “There’s always a way through whatever it is.  Sometimes, it’s a little embarrassing that we have to ask for help and would rather not.

“We get ourselves into these situations, and it’s embarrassing to admit that we need somebody’s help.  It’s awkward, we feel dumb, we feel inadequate and we’re beating ourselves up because we need help.  So, if anybody’s in that place of being afraid because they’re embarrassed…go ahead, be embarrassed…but, then get the help anyway.”

What matters most in Jill’s life is to be able to create the space she deserves in her personal and professional life.  When she’s able to create, write and get a chance to share it with others, she’s a happy gal.