It seems like all too fitting a time for this to occur; just after the release of Half-Blood Prince, with Dumbledore’s death and message on our minds, one of my own, personal Dumbledores has passed away. It wasn’t a complete surprise; my former teacher and mentor had been battling ALS for a few years now, and slowly loosing everyday functions such as the use of his legs and arms. Once diagnosed with ALS, most people are given no more than 5 years to live. It is a sad and sealed fate.

My Dumbledore didn’t give me a final lesson on how to die or a story of his life the last time I saw him. It was this past Friday, and the visit was on a whim, not planned at all. Over the years I have grown close with the family through my close friendship with my Dumbledore’s neice, and the trip to see him just the day before he died felt like any other visit. He spoke with not a wavering voice or a pained face, though I can image how uncomfortable life in a chair had become for him. He seemed just like the man I had known when I was a frightened ten-year old girl, entering middle school for the first time. He spoke of books and music that he had enjoyed recently, and we watched a YouTube video of a robust Hawaiian man singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Nothing in his demeanor showed he was ready to leave his life now — and I cannot help but feel that he wasn’t.

My Dumbledore was young, and yet he showed incredible wisdom and courage. He was the only teacher I knew who never, ever gave up on a student. We had the wackiest bunch of kids go through that middle school while I was there, and he never treated anyone with any more or less respect. He valued the ideas and creative endeavors of each and every one of us. Only a few years ago, he was hiking and skiing and swimming with us. This Friday, I saw his withered hands, almost like the blackened hand of Albus Dumbledore, a quiet warning of a weakening man. I remembered those days back at school when he seemed to be able to feel a student struggling, her shoulders hunched and tense because she couldn’ t solve a math problem or find the right word for a poem, and he would put his hands on her shoulders like a sturdy, silent cheerleader.

It is sad that you never know when your visit with someone will be your last. I am glad I had that last visit with my Dumbledore, even if I never imagined his health to decline so quickly. It felt like a Magical Act of Kindness…not from me to him, but from the world to me, that I got to see him that last time. After I was informed of his passing, I crawled into my bed, feeling numb. I couldn’t believe it. After my visit on Friday, many people had inquired to me about his health, and I told them, “He seems so cheerful, considering his situation.” I cannot help but hope that the cheerfulness I seemed to experience was due to his inner peace with his situation. A stack of his self-published poetry book sat on the kitchen counter, a proud accomplishment of his final months. The news is still fresh to me and I still have trouble fully realizing what his death means.

As we move into a new phase of What Would Dumbledore Do? with the HPA, I feel energized knowing that my Dumbledore looked smiling into the face of the end, if only for the comfort of his loved ones. He had a well-organized mind. And, “After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

We’ve had some awesome merchandise in the past, but the new Harry Potter Alliance merch is through-the-roof-awesome. CHECK IT OUT HERE!

HPA tote bags and HPA water bottles - both of which look great and save you from wasteful plastic bags and bottles. New HPA and What Would Dumbledore Do buttons. An HPA tshirt that is so awesome everyone but Voldemort admits that it’s awesome!

And this is not to mention an amazing Wizard Rock compilation CD and the chance to buy the entire Wizard Rock EP of the Club set of 2008.

Support the Harry Potter Alliance while sporting some amazing new HPA merch!

The Weapon We Have Is Love,

Andrew Slack
Harry Potter Alliance, Executive Director

Okay. I’m officially freaking out with excitement.

First off: another Harry Potter movie coming out for the first time in two years (I feel like it’s Christmas Eve!) and second, in honor of the character whose spirit will guide Harry through this film, we are making #dumbledore one of the most popular trends on Twitter (and retweet this page!)

Momentum is moving now. #dumbledore is surging everywhere. I keep looking at this site and every time I turn away for two minutes it tells me to refresh because there are 2 to 300 new #dumbledore’s. Now tonight is the moment to show the media, to show the world about our love for the message of Dumbledore. And after talking with countless reporters, they are watching us. Let’s make this happen. At Leaky Melissa explains how you can join in most effectively:

It’s all very simple. First, in all your tweets today tack this phrase onto the end of it: “#dumbledore http://tr.im/wwdd” (minus the quotes). The “#dumbledore” tag will start ratcheting the phrase up the ranks and the link will help spread the word. Then, when you see the film, make sure you say something like this (with the phrase Harry Potter in it as well):

Just about to see Harry Potter - in honor of #dumbledore we are taking over Twitter! http://tr.im/wwdd
Just saw Harry Potter - in honor of #dumbledore we are taking over Twitter! http://tr.im/wwdd
Harry Potter was awesome! In honor of #dumbledore we are taking over Twitter! #dumbledore http://tr.im/wwdd

VERY IMPORTANT: We will all be tweeting simultaneously AT 8:59pm PST - or 11:59pm EST! No matter what you are doing make a tweet at that moment!

You get the idea - anything with the phrase Harry Potter and the Dumbledore tag, and, if you can, the link. But the Dumbledore tag is the most important part! #dumbledore

So. Are you ready? Are you ready to take over Twitter? Tweet early. Tweet often. Tweet now. The game is on!!!

Andrew Slack
HP Alliance, Executive Director

P.S. Remember to wear your name tags at the movie theater and to take pictures and post them on our Common Room. CNN has asked me for you to do that as they may want to use them! Be safe everyone and have FUN!

Hey everyone, tonight’s live DA meeting is now online!

The July 13th DA meeting was hosted by Andrew Slack and Karen Bernstein. Our hosts took questions and discussion ideas from the USTREAM chat, spotlighting the Harry Potter Alliance’s What Would Dumbledore Do? campaign.

Ideas and events discussed during the meeting included:

-  Looking back at Harry and Dumbledore from Order of the Phoenix, and looking forward to the film adaptation
-  A summary the What Would Dumbledore Do? Movie Challenge
-  How to avoid spoiling the story when discussing the WWDD campaign
-  Twitter Takeover! Tweet-and-Retweeting before and after the movie. For details, click on “Twitter Challenge” at whatwoulddumbledoredo.org
-  The HPA in the media: Mashable and Canada.com among those discussing the HPA and WWDD
-  What we can blog, vlog, tweet, and post to show our loyalty to Dumbledore’s spirit
-  Where to share all your awesome WWDD pictures and experiences? Go to thehpalliance.ning.com
-  How we can follow Albus Dumbledore and other visionaries who have used love to defeat injustice
-  Chat evaluations of Andrew’s caffeine intake
-  Snogging stories with Andrew and Karen, inspired by the upcoming Harry-and-Ginny on-screen lip-lock

Direct Download

Hey everybody, apologies for the lateness. We had some technical difficulties with our podcasting service. And without further ado:

At our live DA meeting on June 10, Andrew Slack, Hope Mullinax, and Karen Bernstein had a fabulous discussion with each other and the listeners in the USTREAM chat about the Harrry Potter Alliance’s What Would Dumbledore Do? campaign, which was launched at LeakyCon 2009.

Among the many ideas and actions discussed were:

-Why is it important to think about what Dumbledore taught us?
-What is What Would Dumbledore Do? and how long will this campaign last?
-How to harness the media blitz surrounding the movies to bring attention to important causes and events that might otherwise go unreported or under reported
-How Dumbledore moved from an inspirational, untouchable “God-like” character to a more relatable human being in the later books and what we can learn from this transformation
-How we can all be true to the spirit of Albus Dumbledore
-Harry’s hero complex and how our human experience can help us when working on difficult issues like genocide and poverty
-The differences between a wizarding mindset and the muggle mindset when it comes to issues of social justice and social action
-The impact of death and grief on our own lives
- How can you get involved? Blog on the Common Room, post a video response to the WWDD video on the Harry Potter Alliance’s YouTube channel, or contact dumbledore@thehpalliance.org for other ways to get involved.
-The USTREAM chat room discusses bacon, and Andrew, Karen and Hope call Paul DeGeorge and wish him a happy 30th birthday.

Direct Download link: http://media.libsyn.com/media/hpapotterwatch/06_10_09_DA_Meeting_WWDD01.mp3

The HP Alliance’s “What would Dumbledore do?” project launched during LeakyCon in May. It’s been met with an overwhelming response. We would like to get your input and share some things that you can expect from WWDD in the future. We will be hosting a Ustream chat Wednesday, June 10^th at 8:30pm EST. Pottercast is hosting this chat on their channel: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/pottercast Please send any questions or comments about WWDD via Twitter @thehpalliance .

While through What Would Dumbledore Do, we are off to a start in discussing several ways that we can be loyal to the spirit of Albus Dumbledore, are you ready to go deeper than we already have? Because we aren’t messing around here. In declaring our loyalty to the core of Dumbledore’s spirit we are truly stepping out into the night and pursuing “that flighty temptress, adventure” on an adventure and entering the realm of deep speculation.

The importance of such an endeavor cannot be underestimated. To travel to the core of Dumbledore’s soul is to travel to the core of the entire series of Harry Potter. To travel to the core of Dumbledore’s soul is to travel to a clarity where Voldemort’s attempts at splitting his own soul seem more futile and pathetic than nefarious and evil. To travel to the core of Dumbledore’s soul cannot be done through a journey of the intellect alone and so these words will simply not suffice to hold the meaning for which they are intended. For in reality, to travel to the core of Dumbledore’s soul is to travel into the the elusive spiritual reasons for why I believe the Harry Potter novels were written in the first place. To travel to the core of Dumbledore’s soul is to travel to the core of our own soul, the soul of the world.

In essence, we are traveling into the dark and ancient woods of the human unconscious, into the elusive spiritual realities behind why human beings have ever told stories to our kin within caves, our children within cribs, our brethren around fire pits, and our mass communities within movie theaters. By traveling to the core of Dumbledore’s soul, we are traveling to the heart of it all. And to declare our loyalty to this core with every fiber of our strength, with every fiber of our mind, and every fiber of our being is to fully declare our loyalty to the most primordial and in the same instant, the most evolved Being that has ever and will ever be. In the end, the only Being that truly exists at all. The only Being that has ever and will ever exist at all.

But where words fail us in such an indescribable and transcendent journey to the core of Dumbledore’s soul, metaphor stands a chance. And though I am presenting this metaphor as something deep, intense, and heavy, in truth it is as light as a feather. For to travel to the core of Dumbledore’s soul is to travel to the very core of the wands belonging to Dumbledore’s most famous students, Harry Potter and Tom Riddle. What we find at the core of their wands is what we find at the core of Dumbledore’s soul: the Phoenix feather.
Read the rest of this entry »

http://thehpalliance.ning.com/profiles/blogs/power-1

“That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.” (Deathly Hallows page 710).

If we break this quote down, we can learn a lot about what Dumbledore has to teach us about the nature of power. True power does not exist in Voldemort’s mutilated brand of might. True power exists in “house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence.” True power is something that each of us has access to at every moment regardless of our age, regardless of our gender, our race, ethnicity, sexuality, or creed. True power is stepping into ourselves. True power is what Harry and the Potters call, “one thing that I’ve got. One thing that you’ve got inside you too. One thing that we’ve got. And the one thing we’ve got is enough to save us all!”

So let’s talk about this. Power is probably at the height of our culture’s obsession. And for every Wizard, power is important. But if there is a distinction between true power and false power I think we better have that discussion now. Let’s talk about it.

In Harry’s world, what is false power and what is true power? And in our world, what is false power and what is true power?