The Summer Day

This is my faculty advisor (Jill)'s favorite poem. For me, it says everything we're after with The Upcycle: the Earth stuff, the higher education stuff...everything.

I hope you enjoy it.

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Zero to Hero

"Zero to Hero" is a favorite phrase among my friends who are entrepreneurs. But what does it mean?
It means that you start with nothing but an idea - a light bulb moment that illuminates a vision that you have for the world; that something that does not exist yet should exist.
You share your excitement about that idea with others, and if you're lucky, that excitement is infectious. You build support. Perhaps a little money comes in, and some willing hands to build a dream, and some incredibly creative people who take your idea far beyond anything you could have imagined.
And that is what is happening before my eyes, here on the UMBC campus. We have zero storage space or space in which to build (none that is heated or secure, anyway). We have occupied the overhang space on the south side of the Fine Arts building. The hundred or so bottles that we have collected, and the bin we were using, disappeared today. Back to zero.
But we have the support of the Breaking Ground initiative, and a quadricycle, and barrels for flotation, and more brilliant ideas. So we will show up this weekend to build, whether we have "permission" or bottles or not. We will claim our space.