Alan AtKisson Music

Me with my new Sustainibility Compass swag, courtesy of Auburn University
Thanks, !
The Compass - Nature/Economy/Society/Wellbeing, NESW - was invented 25 years ago and has been around the world a bunch of times since then. Educators seem to especially love it as a teaching tool for systems thinking. Auburn U made this beautiful version years ago, and Compass Education ( .compass ) now spreads it even further. They are aiming for 1 million teachers.
Hey, I’m just glad I got a hat and a water bottle!

One of my favorite streets in my favorite city.

Who is listening to my music? It is always a (happy) mystery to me. I read the annual report from streaming services. Lots of interesting data. I know for example that last year, 75 times, someone cued up or used my song "I Love, Therefore I Am". Even on TikTok, once. But who did that? Why? I'll never know.

The bigger numbers go to my light-hearted songs - "We Love the SDGs" is the most listened to (it also got used on TikTok, as background to someone talking about the UN's Global Goals), followed by "The Strangely Popular Lichen Song".

But even Zen Bones, a very personal song from the 1990s, written after my grandmother's funeral, racked up a hundred listens last year.

If you read this, and you are one of those data points, and you feel like saying something about what you listen to ... well, I would be grateful for the feedback.

Here's my Spotify report from 2021. Nice numbers, thanks for listening! Top song: "We Love the SDGs". #2: "The Strangely Popular Lichen Song": 3rd place, "Set the World Right Again."

It's Christmas Eve! Here is a little present - my 1983 song "Christmas Night", never before released. At my website:
https://alanatkisson.com/2021/12/24/christmas-night/
A sweet little tune with a love story and a happy ending.
Happy holidays, everyone!
🎀 🌲🎀🌲🎀🌲🎀🌲🎀🌲🎀🌲🎀🌲🎀🌲🎀🌲🎀🌲🎀🌲🎀🌲🎀

This is the Sustainabilty Compass, invented 1997, now used around the world. I am pleased to announce that I just donated ownership of the Compass - and all the tools that I and colleagues created and developed over many years - to Compass Education, an international non-profit with a big vision: reaching 1 million teachers & transforming schools. You can read more and get more links/info at my blog (link in profile).

There is a story behind this little inspirational poster (which is free to share).
Twenty years ago, I wrote a song called "Goin' to the Top", dedicated to the people of New Orleans. I had hoped (and in fact had been promised) that Aaron Neville would perform the song at a big event that I organized there, working with local business leaders on their long-term development plan. In the end, Aaron Neville was not available, so I performed the song myself, with a band hired in for the occasion. Finally in 2014, I recorded and released the song on my album "American Troubadour" (with some great guitar help from Torbjörn Fall, an excellent Swedish studio band, and Andreas Bauman's expert production). I do love this song. It is pure pop, I admit, but also pure optimism, which is what we felt for New Orleans at that time. It's a song about promise, potential, aiming high. We certainly need that now, across every dimension of global sustainability. This poster is just one line from the song, perhaps the line that resonates with me most. It's not about "going your own way". It's about creating the path you need, to get where you have to go.

Who's listening? -- Once a week, I get info from Spotify and Apple Music about who's listening to my music. Not individuals or names, just numbers, locations, songs. The Apple numbers (see picture) are never very high: last week two people listened to five songs total. (It's a lot more on Spotify, though never gigantic.) This awakens personal curiousity. Who are these folks? Both were in the US. One in Providence, RI, the other in Denver. I am not aware of any friends or family in those cities. Some of the songs suggest they might be teachers, using my environmental humor songs (including "Dead Planet Blues" and "The Strangely Popular Lichen Song"). But then there's "I Love, Therefore I Am", a song tinged with both melancholy and joy, written just before (and delivered with) my first-ever international keynote speech, in Prague in 1992, when I was a late substitute for Wangari Maathai. That song is one of my personal favorites. Who's listening to that one, I wonder? Who listens to my music generally? If you do, please let me know.

It’s World Book Day (UNESCO). What a wonderful, essential thing to celebrate. Don’t think I could live without books. Here are a few of mine.

If these flowers were a song, how would they sound?

Quotes from my books and other published writing. First of a series. See link in bio for the full story.

It's a nice feeling, knowing that everyday, somewhere in the world, at least a few people are listening to one of my songs. Here is the latest top 10 list. "Zen Bones" makes a surprising jump to #2. So here are the lyrics.

ZEN BONES
© 1994 Alan AtKisson

We lit the fire the first day of Spring
There is smoke and ashes in every living thing
And there's something nameless, like a great opening
In these old zen bones

Fire the ancient lady — smoke take her soul
Let the warm winds lift her to where the thunder rolls
Let the heat of burning burn out the cold
In her old zen bones

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
There's a piece of fire in every one of us
Burns like coal to cinder, iron to rust
Burns our old zen bones

I walked to the lookout — looked out to sea
Felt the winds of heaven pouring over me
Like the breath of a lifetime, like an old memory
In my old zen bones

And I'm singin' now

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
There's a piece of fire in every one of us
Burns like coal to cinder, iron to rust
Burns our old zen bones

Sing it now

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
There's a piece of fire in every one of us
Burns like coal to cinder, iron to rust
Burns our old zen bones

Celebrating what would have been my friend Donella Meadows 80th birthday. She’s been gone 20 years now, but I still miss her and take inspiration from her work and example every day. Read more at DonellaMeadows.org (pic from 1994 or thereabouts)

The end of another week of work with good colleagues around the planet, many meetings, discussions and a great deal of reading and the taking in of information about our world, sometimes uplifting, sometimes greatly saddening. I mourn for the democracy protesters, average age 17, who were killed in Myanmar this week, and for the many human rights defenders who have lost their lives to violence and oppression already this year. I rejoice in the bravery of women and men fighting for the rights of women and girls, working hard to alleviate suffering in the world’s swelling refugee settlements and conflict zones, and struggling to protect dwindling nature. There is much suffering in our world right now, but so much beauty and courage, too. It is a good time to be working in sustainable development — because so many people in the world badly need it. They need us to reverse its current setbacks. They need it to advance and succeed. We all do.

5 years ago. Zürich. Bought the guitar, in memory of my friend Joan Davis. Photo by Gillian Martin Mehers. (Thanks Gillian.)

Last month's top ten list on Spotify. The Strangely Popular Lichen Song has moved back up to its historically #1 position, moving ahead of We Love the SDGs. So, the novelty songs do best, but I'm happy to see I'll Be, Isn't There Someone Here and Moon's Best Friend -- songs built on memories from youth -- getting more listens. You can find all my recorded music on Spotify, Apple, Amazon and YouTube.

Till alla mina vänner i Sverige: nu släpper jag den svenska översättningen av min lilla bästsäljare. Gratis. Dela gärna. http://hallbarhetforalla.wordpress.com.

May I warmly recommend this book? Fantastically rigorous and enlightening. And beautiful. I learned so much from Lynn Gamwell, things I wish I’d known decades ago when I was living through some of the moments and movements she describes (and all their historical precursors). A great holiday gift for any art/science aficionado. My “book of the year” (an updated and expanded edition just released in 2020, first edition was 2002).

Stockholm this morning.

Sun keeps coming up, no matter what else happens on this planet.

Stockholm, 6 pm, Nov 3

Happy Day After Halloween! Daughter and friend made a fine jack-o-lantern 🎃 last night, brightens up this gray Sunday morning.

My morning commute is a daily revelation of light and shadow, seasonal change, and meditations on the metaphor of life-as-road.

My first book. The bestselling book in its category for 1999 (on Amazon). Embarrassing cover. But writing it, finishing it, publishing it was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done.

Worked on it over a six-year period, but it was finally a commission from Donella Meadows - together with a $15,000 advance that she arranged - that got me over the hump and into serious writing. And it was an amazingly productive stint at the Mesa Refuge writer’s retreat (drafted 6 chapters in 6 days) that made the book come alive.

Very grateful for all of that. And for all the wonderful letters and comments received over the years.

I still have that computer

Two more book-covers in this reverse-order parade. Here’s the second edition of “Believing Cassandra”, last updated in 2010. I doubt another update is warranted: while this book was used in courses on sustainability for many years, its voice is from another time, when sustainable development was still a new idea (and I a much younger man). Most of the ideas I was introducing to readers are now built into mainstream government institutions, economic policy and corporate practice. Sustainability evolved from a movement to a profession to a basic requirement taught in schools and universities. People working specifically with sustainability and sustainable development grew from a few thousand in the early 1990s (when I first started working on this book) to millions today. And Cassandra? Unfortunately, our modern Cassandras - the scientific prophets who warned that our economic growth would bump up against nature’s limits - have been proven right, which was exactly what they hoped to avoid (by issuing their warnings). But the transformation they said was needed finally appears to be under way, at least in some important areas. Read this book if you want a perspective on how we got here, what we (still) have to do, and how, in our capacity to destroy on a massive scale, there lie the seeds of hope that we can also transform and restore on a massive scale.

Published 2012, a collection of selected essays, columns, articles and speeches, “Because We Believe in the Future.” From my first published piece on sustainability in 1989 to my calls for a “reset” twenty years later in 2009 (a reset which we actually got, in 2015, with Agenda 2030 and the SDGs), this book acts as a kind of historical snapshot of the sustainability movement from the perspective of a certain guy who happened to be very involved. Includes my early “viral” column, “Dear Santa, I Hear the North Pole is Melting.” (Back then, it was still just a worry.)

Poetry. Missed this one in the reverse-order sequence. Writing poems has always been part of my writing life, they give me great personal satisfaction, but I rarely attempt to publish them in a mainstream poetry journal or magazine. If you’re interested in reading my poetry, and you don’t want to buy the book online, contact me and I’ll send you an electronic copy. No charge. I’m alway just amazed, happy, and grateful when people read it.

Yes, “The ISIS Agreement” (2008). You can understand why I had to change the title (to The Sustainabilty Transformation, for the 2nd ed) as well as the name of the core method (to VISIS) as well as the academy name for the business that taught master classes around the world.

VISIS = Vision, Indicators, Systems, Innovation, Strategy. This book (and its 2nd edition) packaged up my methodological contributions to the sustainability movement, most of which are still pretty widely used, for example in international schools, thanks to CompassEducation.org.

But the principle target audience was business and government. Hence all the upward-pointing arrows. Publisher’s idea.

Not easy when a global terrorist movement captures your branding.

2010: The Sustainability Transformation. Widely used in professional training programs. I like the butterfly.

Book covers in reverse order: 2013 and “Sustainabilty is for Everyone”, over 30,000 copies sold (I lost count), translated into German, Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia - also Swedish and French (but never published in those languages). This book was a surprise even to me. Written as a letter of encouragement to my peers in the field, it was adopted as an intro book by companies and universities. The second edition in 2017 was updated to include the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

All my book covers in reverse order. First up, from 2016, Parachuting Cats into Borneo (with Axel Klimek).

Here is the current Spotify top-10 list. "We Love the SDGs" remains my biggest "hit" to date (nearly 60,000 views on YouTube now). But "The Strangely Popular Lichen Song" remains, as ever, strangely popular. Personally glad to see personal favorite "Midsummer Island (Surrounded by Beauty)" finally on this list. Stay tuned for a music video with that song, coming soon. 😎

“These are times of trouble / these are times of toil and tears ...” I wrote this song under very different circumstances - but it is more relevant now than ever. And today, July 4, is the best day to listen to it.

American Troubadour Alan AtKisson · Song · 2014

Listen to “American Troubadour” on July 4: “We hold these truths to be self-evident...”

American Troubadour Alan AtKisson · Song · 2014

I’m posting this wonderful Dylan interview because ... well, just because.

Bob Dylan Has a Lot on His Mind In a rare interview, the Nobel Prize winner discusses mortality, drawing inspiration from the past, and his new album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways.”