Photo of Panjiayuam flea market by IvanWalsh.com, via Flickr Creative Commons

Wang Weiguo, an award-winning actor with the National Theatre Company of China, was wandering through Bejing’s Panjiayuan Flea Market when he found a treasure, 20 exquisite picture frames. He bought them all.

Inside the frames were a woman’s life story. There were pictures of her as a baby and a growing child, pictures with her parents. Wang Weiguo was sure someone had lost them. He contacted the police and media. He showed them to friends and to people living outside China. No one recognized the people in the photographs.

That was 1999. Wang never gave up the search. In 2010 he told the story to a TV host, Zhang Zequn, who suggested he contact China Radio International. Within three months of the story’s being posted on CRI, someone recognized Julie Ege in one of the photographs. The stunning Norwegian actress and model was the mother of the child whose growing years the photos traced.

The child was Joanna Syson. She had moved to Beijing in the 1990s to study Chinese. In 1999 she returned to Norway for six months, entrusting all her belongings, including the photographs, to a friend. When she returned, the friend was gone. So were her belongings. She was heartbroken.

More than a decade passed. Then, thanks to the story posted on CRI and to a visitor to the Web site, the trail finally led to Joanna Syson. She traveled to Bejing to meet Wang Weiguo, who had searched for her for 12 years, and to recover her treasured photographs.

The story has a particularly poignant epilogue. Syson’s Norwegian home burned a few years ago. All of her family photographs were lost.

Now, at least, she has the photographs found by a kind and determined man who never stopped trying to return them to her.

To hear the whole, magical story, listen to “Visions of Joanna”, the radio documentary created by Danielle Nerman.

In May 2011 it was just a dream. Now there are 300 reasons for hope on this blog.

The numbers make me smile, but the real magic is in the people who have inspired me and all those who have stopped by the site. Before I started the blog I didn’t know about

• Julius Mwelu, the photographer who puts cameras in the hands of youth living in slums and lets them tell the powerful stories of the people around them
• Claude Demarais, the professor who dreamed Preservation Farm into existence
• Mary Johnson, who found it in heart to forgive her son’s killer
• Our Time Theatre, where only stutterers can participate and where they thrive on unconditional love
• Aunty Grace Dick and Joan Rayment, whose cross-cultural friendship spans 50 years and thousands of miles
• The good people at The Little Free Library, who build tiny libraries, attach them to posts and encourage people to plant them in neighbourhoods everywhere
• Roscoe, the dog who adopted a neighbourhood and who is loved and fiercely protected by the people there

What all 300 posts say to me is that everyone of us harbours the seeds of greatness, whether our gift is photography, farming or friendship. We all get discouraged, and sometimes we feel small and inadequate.

That’s where This Gives Me Hope comes in. When life hands you lemons, take a few minutes to read some of the posts. Somewhere among them you’ll find the inspiration you need to spread your wings and soar.

The first 300 reasons for hope were so easy to find that I have files bulging with others. So keep watching, send suggestions, and share what gives you hope on our Facebook page.

The 2001 talk he gave on how he defines success is still a model looked to be many. Thanks to TED, everyone can hear it.

Wooden threw out old definitions of success based on money and material goods and replaced them with his own. He decided success was “Peace of mind, attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you are capable.”

He cobbled together his personal view of success based on his father’s teachings, a lot of poetry, and his own observations. To guide his classroom teaching at UCLA, he chose this verse:

No written word, no spoken plea
Can teach our youth what they should be
Nor all the books on all the shelves
It’s what the teachers are themselves

From what I’ve heard about Coach Wooden, he had the same view of coaching. He never talked with his team about winning. He talked about doing their best, telling them, “You can lose when you can outscore somebody in a game, and you can lose when you outscore somebody.”

John Wooden coached winning teams, but the final score was the byproduct. He brought out the best in his basketball players. His string of wins has still never been matched, but what he wanted most, and achieved, was for his players to walk away as winners, no matter how the game ended.

John Wooden was the kind of mentor everyone needs, the kind who sees and nurtures whatever strengths are in those who come through his door.

Rest in peace, Coach Wooden. You changed a lot of lives.

Toronto City Hall - Green Roof; photo by Commodore Gandalf Cunningham, via Flickr Creative Commons

Toronto is making history. The first city in North American to require green roofs on new developments moves into the third phase of its Green Roof Bylaw on April 30, 2012.

Adopted in 2009, the bylaw required the environmentally friendly roofs on residential, commercial and institutional buildings starting in 2010. Now, with the addition of industrial developments, all new buildings with a minimum Gross Floor Area of 2,000 square meters will be required to devote 20-60 percent of Available Roof Space to vegetation.

Aside from the pollution-scrubbing gift of rooftop parks, the greenery pays off in lower utility bills.  Two American green roofs give an idea of potential savings. The Chicago City Hall installed a green roof in 2000 and now saves $5,000 a year. New York’s Con Edison Green Roof absorbs 30 percent of the rainwater that falls on it. It also reduces heat loss by 34 percent in winter and heat gain by 84 percent in summer.

Thanks to the bylaw, Torontonians have access to an urban oasis on City Hall’s podium roof. They can check out the gardens atop the YMCA of Greater Toronto. If they buy a unit in the Hugh Garner Housing Co-operative, they can enjoy the largest green roof in Canada. They can also visit other green roofs, such as those on ESRI Canada, Duca Financial Services, and Ryerson and York Universities.

Other cities considering green roof bylaws will find a lot of helpful resources on Toronto’s website. These include policy development, benefits of green roofs, bylaw language, and construction standards.

Developers have not all embraced the new bylaw, citing increased costs. However, the marketing pluses of a green roof like the one at the Toronto City Hall, coupled with utilities savings and environmental pluses, is gradually gaining converts.

Some new songs have moved into that space, thanks to Julia Dinsmore, who never steers me wrong. She introduced me to The Smooch! Project, Marnita’s Table, and Susan Allen.

Now she has introduced me to Barbara McAfee. If angels sing, they probably sound like Barbara. She has songs that make me stand tall and celebrate. “Yes” is one of those, a joyous celebration of saying YES to life, with lines like this that make me want to cheer:

May our being together ease the load that we bear
May we take up a habit of happiness
May we dwell in the spirit of Yes

Then there’s the song she co-wrote with one of her voice coaching students, Jeannie Leicester. “More Than a House” became the anthem of a build for Habitat for Humanity in Winona, Minnesota. Since then it has grown wings. The music is in the walls of a house built in Guatemala. Lucy Mathews Heegard (whose blog, Stories @Studio Lu, is a gem. turned it into a video.

She also has a wicked sense of humour. Check out her “Mango Tango” and “Better Birthday Song”.

Thanks, Julia, for introducing me to this splendid woman. And thanks, Barbara, for your gift to the world.

Barbara McAfee’s music is on my iPod now, and it’s in my soul. Watch this video, another from Stories@StudioLu, and you’ll be singing along too.

Follow Barbara on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

We all need a sense of purpose, a belief that our lives count, that our time on the planet makes a difference. So this Generation Waking Up movement gives me hope. I watched the video below with a big grin on my face.

These young people, born roughly between 1978 and 2000, are on a mission to change the world. I’m cheering them on.

I’ve written about some of them on this blog: Taina Uitto of Plastic Manners, the team who created EyeWriter, Jessica Cox who has no arms but flies a plane, the musicians of Playing for Change, and SPIN farmer Curtis Stone. They were among my first 25 reasons for hope on this blog. Since then I’ve featured many more from this dynamic generation.

They have big dreams. The Generation Waking Up site describes them this way:

Our generation’s calling is clear: to create a thriving, just, sustainable world that works for all, we must take bold and systemic action to transform our whole society. Generation Waking Up is a response to this call, a campaign created by our generation to rally all that is needed to take this movement to scale.

It is a big dream, a vision worthy of their attention and energy. When I look around the world I see a lot of these young people acting on that big dream.

They give me hope.

Thanks to apple_pathways for making this photo available via Flickr Creative Commons

The tiny house my single mother could afford was on Jackson Street, in Twin Falls, Idaho. At the time, it was a dead-end street.

At its end lived a sharecropper, Paul Friend. Children always figure out who lives in a neighbourhood long before their parents do. I don’t remember how my brother and I first introduced ourselves to Paul Friend, but we soon learned he grew the sweetest cantaloupe, the juiciest watermelon we had ever tasted.

In my mind’s eye is a vivid picture of his spare frame, clad in jeans and a dark blue work shirt, bent over the rows of melons he lovingly tended. Now and then he would stop for a break. He would pull out a pocket knife, open the blade, and slice into a perfectly ripe melon.

He would pass slices to his young visitors, and we would sit there in the field, juice running down our arms. All was right in our world when we were with Paul Friend. He didn’t talk much, but he listened a lot, with the kind of attention that pulls the best out of us at any age.

When he first sent us home with our arms loaded with melons, Mother marched down to his small farm. Melons were a treat we could rarely afford, but she was not going to allow us to take advantage of our new friend. If we accepted melons, we had to pay for them.

He understood how hard she was trying to bring us up with good values. So now and then he would take a nickel or a dime, just to keep things straight with Mother.

But money was never the real medium of exchange. What he offered with those melons was love, more bushels of it than all the melons of our years on Jackson Street.

Years ago a song by TR Ritchie stopped me in my tracks. The words of “Whitebark” can still bring me to tears.

I’ve weathered storms I cannot count
To make this world my home
In a place where small and twisted things
Can split the hardest stone

When I photographed these trees around Oakland, California’s Lake Merritt, I could hear the song. I was still reeling from the end of a marriage, and although I was thrilled to be starting a fascinating new job, I was lost. I had changed countries to take the job, back to a land I had been away from so long it was no longer home, to a new city where I was a stranger.

Twisted - and strong

It isn’t only our outward forms that can be twisted. So can our spirits. Mine was a pretzel I didn’t think would ever straighten.

These twisted trees gave me hope. Their winding trunks invited lovers to sit under the shade of their canopies. Travelers leaned against them to be photographed. Children climbed them. They were more mysterious and alluring than their straight-grained neighbours.

I returned to them over and over in the fifteen months I lived in Oakland, each time drawing strength from their twisted forms. They helped me remember that the kinks and swirls and broken places of our lives can turn out to be gifts, once we move past their sharp edges.

When I was young, I used to say I wanted to live in a way that would give me good stories for my rocking-chair years. I didn’t understand then that what makes the stories interesting is often what makes them hardest while we’re living them.

We are all, in our own ways, small and twisted things, but we can split the hardest stone.

(You can listen to “Whitebark” on TR Ritchie’s Web site and download his fine songs on iTunes.)

Hip-hop artist Adair Lion won me over with this video. The Amarillo, Texas, artist comes out strongly with a song called “Gay Is OK.”

The story woven through it is a heart tugger. Along with some straight-out, gutsy lyrics calling homophobia into question, Adrian shows the child of two dads coming up against bigotry.

The last scene has brought me to tears twice already, and I know I’ll watch it again. I have a granddaughter with two moms. For her sake and the sake of her special mothers, I want to scour the world of the last, lingering bits of homophobia.

So, Adair Lion, thanks for this song. You got it right. “Gay Is OK.”

When we’re young, the years pass like turtles, inching toward the year we start school, dragging toward birthdays, graduations, and independence. The change is gradual, but eventually a time comes when days, weeks, years fly by so quickly they should be clocked for speeding.

At 65 I want to put reins on time, slow it down enough I don’t forget to savour moments before they become memories. Daily walks, usually with a camera slung around my neck, are one way I lasso time and keep it in check, even if it’s just for the space of the walk.

The camera reminds me to pay attention. I watch for season’s changes, like the first ducklings to appear or the re-emergence of the turtles. I notice the angles of the boardwalk through the marsh and the way willow leaves shine in the sun. I admire the assurance and curiosity of a toddler just learning to walk. I stop to scratch a dog and chat with its owner.

I don’t suppose time will ever move slowly for me again. Fewer years lie ahead of me than behind so the telescoping of time seems normal. But through the lens of my camera, I feel a connection with all that is and all that is to come. I am returned to wonder, and this gives me hope.