Crossroads Dispatches

it's a jungle out there... and the ecosystems they co-create

"There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe ..." - Teilhard de Chardin

On a visit to Indiana in April, witnessing the bloom of purple allium and the elm trees through the window, I happened upon a New York Times op-ed piece that became the stepping-stone to why I returned to engage with the San Francisco Bay Area ecosystem, again:

"When [Peter] Thiel is talking about a “monopoly,” he isn’t talking about the illegal eliminate-your-rivals kind. He’s talking about doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity. . . 

His lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.

Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows." - "The Creative Monopoly," New York Times, April 23, 2012

Today via Fred Wilson's blog, I was acquainted with Sep Kamvar, a professor at MIT Media Lab with an artistic sensibility, who wrote an essay on the principle of cyclicity. Cyclicity is another phrase for the ineffable philosophy I keep being drawn towards. Last week the closest phrase I could come up with was "generative ecosystem." And it's the generative and regenerative ecosystem aspect of Silicon Valley that drew me here, even though in other respects I feel like an odd man out. Sure, it's not in everyone's DNA, but it is here.

I'm on my laptop at Coupa Cafe, with its rustic, earthy beauty redolent of Latin America--high ceilings, hexagons in skylights, thick stone floors inlaid with colored mosaic, walls the color of blood oranges--and I read about the 26-year-old co-owner of Coupa Cafe, Jean Paul Coupal:

"[He] didn’t quite expect the Palo Alto cafe to become such a tech magnet. But he has encouraged it, adding a zippy 50 megabit WiFi network and encouraging people to camp out with their laptops. Since the beginning we wanted it to be a place where you aren’t kicked out,” Coupal says. “At a restaurant, they bring you the check and you feel you have to leave. We didn’t want that. We wanted people to feel at home.”"

From last week to this week I notice a new item, handcrafted* toffee, displayed at the counter (I'd spotted "Toffee Talk" at the downtown San Jose Farmer's Market the previous Friday and the samples I enjoyed were luscious). Coupal gives newly-seeded projects and ideas a chance to take root:

"There are many people and institutions in Silicon Valley willing to help new startups, including incubators, universities, angels, venture capital firms and big tech companies. But local small businesses like Coupa that are willing to give new startups a shot are  another important part of this ecosystem." - "Coupa Cafe: Where Start-ups Meet, Work, and Test Products," Forbes, December 5, 2011

As I type this, a man to my left interrupts my absorption in blog-writing to ask if there are any extra power outlets by me.

At first I say, "No, there's not," since it is true.

Then, I find myself double-checking my laptop battery. It's at 100%, so I offer him the power outlet I'd been using as his laptop is drained. It doesn't always work out this way, yet it's not usual for the ones who thrive. We tend to think of 'power places' like NYC and Silicon Valley as spots that abide by the law of the jungle--it's either you or me, we must take from and be predatory for our mere survival--yet do jungles actually thrive through cut-throat means? Tachi Kiuchi and Bill Shireman, in, What We Learned in the Rainforest: Business Lessons from Nature, say:

"Rainforest species are not solitary organisms fighting myriad others to be the last to survive in a hostile environment. They all depend on each other to collectively build an ecosystem, each defining an exclusive niche vital to and dependent on the other niches that border and overlap it.

...the most valuable resources of the rainforest [are] not the trees or other physical resources, but the relationships, the complex array of [symbiotic] designs [among the species.] 

"This cooperation is not conscious, as human cooperation sometimes is; it is a consequence of specialization and interdependency. As they specialize, living things find it to their advantage to cooperate. Whether they like it or not the parts come together, in cooperation, as wholes.

Ecosystems are not isolated entities with impenetrable borders. Every ecosystem is nested within, borders on, or overlaps with other systems.

A verge is a rich mixture of ecosystems that happens where two distinct forms meet with each other and begin to intermix. Verges are places of conflict, but also of positive change. They bring together diverse systems and set the stage either for their integration or for their destruction.

Our economy, too, is on a verge. " 

Even after The Creative Monopoly op-ed instigated pondering a move, I wasn't certain (I'd sworn I'd never return to Silicon Valley--primarily as it couldn't fulfill my desire to express myself beside the cerebral facet of myself). And it seemed absurd to risk returning to the Bay Area ecosystem on a drained battery (i.e. shoestring budget). A few days after The Creative Monopoly omen, Oakland, CA resident, publisher, and author of Starting Your Book and MotherWealth, Naomi Rose e-mails me:

"I just found you on the Internet in a way that I can only call "inspired." I have come to realize that, as a sole proprietor doing everything, I really do need help, and especially in the area of marketing. But when I looked online at marketing help, it was all the same old high-powered competitive-oriented thing. A lover of slowness (and working that way, with my clients and my books), I asked myself, "Could there be such a thing as 'slow marketing'?"

 

So I typed it in. When the term came up in Wikipedia, it cited you as the originator of the term. Then I went to your blog, read much of it, and found you."

That's what cinched it for me. Something I wrote in 2006, "Slow Food, Slow Sex, Slow Marketing" while I still lived in the Bay Area, spoke to someone else there. At the time of writing, I truly felt like an outlier (and it was only a matter of time before I left in January 2008 to find somewhere that my way of being might be welcomed as a contribution to the whole).

So I was particularly warmed and inspired today, to read, in full--"Cyclicity: Missions and Metrics" by Sep Kamvar (his and Jonathan Harris' entire essay series are worthwhile) which I include here: 

"There is an old Zen story about a man riding a horse, galloping frantically down a path. His friend, who is sitting by the side of the road, calls out "Where are you going?" The man replies: "I don't know. Ask the horse!"

When we build our tools, we often depend on metrics to guide our development. We keep graphs of unique visitors and pageviews and watch them closely. This keeps us honest. It's hard to convince anybody that we're building a useful tool if our metrics show that nobody is using it.

But we must take care when we use metrics. Metrics can be like the horse in the old Zen story. Once we decide on them, they have a habit of setting the agenda. As the old adage goes, what gets measured gets managed.

The standard metric for a country's economic welfare is GDP. I find this strange. If the government decided to give millions of dollars to the country's richest people so that they can buy yachts from one another, that would increase GDP. So would clearcutting our national forests to build strip malls, outsourcing the raising of our children, and incarcerating large swaths of our poor.

If we temper the language a bit, we might find that this description is not so far from reality.

My point is that metrics shape behavior. Joseph Stiglitz describes this mechanism nicely: "What we gather our information about, and how we describe success, affects what we strive for." Political leaders who want to grow the economy, he says, will focus policies on things that increase GDP, even when GDP does not correlate with societal well-being.

Which brings me to my second point: all metrics leave something out. Often, they leave the most important things out.

In 2007, Stanford offered a course called "CS377W: Creating Engaging Facebook Apps". The course assignment was to build a Facebook application that, according to the course website, would "focus on solving a problem for a broad audience." It was an intensively metrics-driven class, and the key metric was user numbers. By the metrics, the results were astonishing: in the course of the 10-week term, the apps collectively reached 16 million users.

The flipside was that the applications themselves were underwhelming. Most of them allowed users to do things like rank the attractiveness of their friends, send virtual hugs and have virtual pillow fights. The substance of the applications reflected what the metric left out. If it were possible to measure the value of a user's attention, or how enriching an application is to her life, the course projects would likely have been quite different. But sometimes, the important things can't be measured.

It is useful, therefore, to have missions to balance our metrics. Of course, each tool should have its own mission. But if I were to suggest one mission for all tools, it might be this:

Every tool should nourish the things upon which it depends.

We see this principle at varying levels in some of our tools today. I call them cyclical tools. The iPhone empowers the developer ecosystem that helps drive its adoption. A bike strengthens the person who pedals it. Open-source software educates its potential contributors. A hallmark of cyclical tools is that they create open loops: the bike strengthens its rider to do things other than just pedal the bike.

Cyclical tools are like trees, whose falling leaves fertilize the soil in which they grow.

At the top of the stack, all tools depend on nature and human nature. They depend on the sun, trees, minerals, and fossil fuels to provide their raw materials and energy. They depend on the creativity of builders to give them form. And they depend on the attention of their users, without which they would languish.

An ecosystem of cyclical tools would therefore nourish nature and empower people. A fully cyclical software application may, for example, use peer-to-peer data centers powered by its users, consisting of biodegradable, fertilizing microprocessors. It would be open-source and provide APIs to empower the creativity of builders, and a clean design and useful purpose that cultivates the concentration of its users.

If some of this sounds like science fiction, so did manned lunar vehicles in 1950, or self-driving cars in 2000. We have a tendency to achieve what we focus on.

It’s difficult to build cyclical tools because the alternative is so tempting. Cars are faster than bikes. FishVille reaches more people than Moby Dick. At first, cyclical tools appear to be lower-power, slower-growth, and more expensive than extractive tools.

But you can’t measure the impact of tools on their own. You must measure them by the ecosystems that they co-create."

* "Catherine is adamant that her toffee remain an artisanal, handmade confection and continues to prepare every batch herself." - Toffee Talk website

ART CREDITS: Henri Rousseau's The Dream, Exotic Landscape with Playing Monkeys, and Two Monkeys in the Jungle.

the next great unknown

At first I didn't connect a friend's email subject line:

row row row your boat gently down the stream

with the "truck art" I saw last night when I went for a walk. 

I mulled over that "last great unknown" phrase. So I memorized the line "last great unknown," Wyoming, Powell and resolved to look up the website when I came back home from my walk.  I already knew of Powell since I've run many of the canyons* (Lodore, Westwater, Desolation, Gray, Cataract--alas not Grand Canyon) that he would explore in his expedition. 

As I walked I also became less perturbed and more curious about the sensations of the flight-or-fight stress response that were threatening to debilitate my entire being (releasing cortisol, adrendaline and what-not). Logically, there wasn't a reason. I wasn't being chased by a woolly mammoth. My mind, as was its habit, was simply freaking out in wanting to know for certain what was next (even a lie would suffice to pacify it). It wasn't getting any clear signal that could serve as any reference point--and that was its issue. I don't know if the feeling is what what we commonly call 'fear' is as this physiological response felt even more primal and fundamental than emotion.

My fears weren't quelled, but there was the insight that it wasn't going to get what it wanted. And somehow there was relief in this answer answer: Actually, there is no last great unknown. It's just the next great unknown, and the next. The only drama in all this is fabrifactured when (and if) I think life and I are two separate entities at cross-purposes.

I do not think humanity has even touched the surface of what is possible when we don't rush around looking for surety of shore, when we don't hole up in cozy lakes... but allow the current of the mighty river its due. When I remember that the Unknown is also You and I, is Us, is All, then the 'have to know' rift disappears.

The U-Haul Venture Across America website on Powell's 1869 river expedition is curated really well (pleasantly surprised), and I thought it spoke in everyday language to facing the unknown, embracing its call, and the spirit of expedition. 

"Hello, my name is John Wesley Powell. It is the 24th of May 1869, and the good people of Green River City have turned out to see us start. Today we begin our expedition into the last great unknown within the continental United States. I am proud to say that I am a self-driven, self-taught man of action, and am determined to conquer these unmapped, uncharted rivers and canyons, knowing that if I should fail, sure death awaits me and my crew. The nine men making the expedition along with me are prepared to embark on what I believe will be a 10-month journey throughout lands into which no one has ventured. It is my future goal to ultimately be able to guide Americans safely into the West. I seek knowledge of, and want to explore, what many believe cannot be done. Native Americans have told me that to enter the canyon is to disobey the gods and should not be done.

I have chosen a different path than that of my father, but believe that my calling lies in the depths of the canyon walls, or perhaps rushes through the rivers’ water. I see many people here today at Expedition Island in Wyoming that I shall later invite to join me on this adventurous expedition through writings I intend to note in my journal. As our expedition into the American West is about to begin, and final preparation is quickly coming to an end, I would like to take a moment to write down how I came to be here today."

I also found it inspiring that Powell feels as if he is following a 'calling' or nudge that's bigger than his parental conditioning or any sense of self-preservation--and he is going to follow it--come what may.

Also this diary passage resonates with me because Powell ventures forth with an ensemble, and as I've come to realize that atriums are more my style than freelancing solo in a coffee shop, reading that really struck a chord. In fact, I just landed today in Silicon Valley on a scouting mission because I want to be engaged in an expedition with a shared purpose again (and that takes place face-to-face, not just virtual teams). 

I noted too that Powell decides to keep a diary in order to share his journey widely. This one feels far more courageous than tumbling down thick Western rivers in petite wooden boats, but I've seen that, for me, it is important not slip into hiding, and keep on sharing, out loud--especially in these exciting times.

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream. 

* I lived in Salt Lake City and my ex-husband was an investor in Adventure River Expeditions (three things I love) in southern Utah (it's been acquired, so not A.R.E. now). 

p.s. If you're in the Bay Area, I'll be here thorugh June 1. I'm investigating an accelerator idea, and some other quixotry. It's too much to go into in one blog post, but you can check out my bookmarks under Education and Innovation to connect the dots and get a sense. If you tend to work best with a group of peers and partners, drop me a line.  

Image Credits: U-Haul, John Wesley Powell's expedition 1869 photos from their own expedition photographer ("Powell's Grand Ambition" covers the difficulty of the Grand Canyon portion of the journey); Swimming Cities of Switchback Seas is a sculptural floating city assembled by Swoon and crew.  

delving into spring, or does a bamboo ask Is this too exuberant?

At least where I live, the white and mauve blossoms are peeping through the buds. Feathery fern unfurls on the mesquite trees around the sidewalks sharing the Mojave desert. Delicate orange globules grace the gritty branches of globemallow.

In Chinese philosophy, Bamboo hints at the sensation of the bounding energy of Spring.

Leaping. Springing. Generative, generous, circulating.

I jot: treat myself as kindly as a newly planted seed.

Does bamboo ask: Oh, this is too exuberant? I'm running away with juiciness and bursts of myself, greening and preening... Life isn't self-conscious, It simply blooms. 

i imagine that yes is the only living thing. - e. e. cummings

I also jot what it feels for me, through me: a feathery tender type of power (blithe, light-hearted, skipping stones and ripples, barefoot meadow twirling, fireflies, laughter, soaring, whimsy, soaring, en-light-ness, cloud macaroons)... power nonetheless.

The Abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen called this vitality, this life-force, viriditas, or greenness: "In her works it has been translated in various ways, such as freshness, vitality, fertility, fecundity, fruitfulness, verdure, or growth. (Wikipedia)"

I happened to pick up a Food And Wine magazine at my convivial neighborhood coffee shop Sambalatte the other day for no particular reason. Flipped to the article on two chefs who got together for an entire weekend in one's home kitchen to improvise and delve and "explore the way inspiration turns raw ingredients into a finished dish." They prowled the fields of a farm in the Marin County hills, the stalls at the Ferry Plaza farmer's market, and unkempt urban park for wood sorrell and foraged berries for their raw materials. Then, they went off to play. (They called it cooking, but I knew better.)

The entire article reeked of Spring, even though its printed spine claimed January. Even if you are not a chef, it was a little gem of an article about the creative process, appreciating what's at hand and Nature as inspiration. Here are just two snippets from "An Intimate Look at the Creative Life of Chefs":

He [Rene Redzepi] opened his Copenhagen restaurant Noma at the age of 26 in 2003, a time when few people took Nordic cuisine seriously. Disavowing black pepper, olive oil and other non-local staples, Redzepi began looking more closely at what grew around him. His focus turned into a sort of radical naturalism that led him to discover, categorize and develop a cuisine around the edibles he found in the wilderness—new varieties of horseradish or seaweed, for instance, or a beach grass with a flavor identical to cilantro. One of the signature dishes at Noma is white asparagus cooked with pine branches plucked from trees that grow alongside the asparagus field; it’s landscape as recipe, and the results are improbably compelling.

And:

[Daniel] Patterson topped his egg with a sauce of fresh chèvre and water, adding a garnish of rosemary flowers he’d gathered from the roadside while walking his dog earlier that morning. Redzepi finished his with a sauce of aged goat cheese and nasturtium blossoms; he’d spotted the wildflowers in Patterson’s backyard while drinking coffee on the porch.

Yep:

The experience got the two chefs talking about how they develop dishes at their restaurants. “It’s weird,” said Redzepi. “Because you work toward some type of perfection, if it exists. And then when you reach something that you’re happy with—you can spend four years reaching that point—then it’s over. The whole thing is process.”

Patterson agreed: Once he gets a dish just right, its days on his menu are numbered.

To impress the direction I'm writing towards and delving for March/April, I present Bruce Mau's "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" via PaPaYa art/cards' blog (their stuff is so totally bouyant springy):

1. Allow events to change you. 
   You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
   
   
2. Forget about good. 
   Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.
   
   
3. Process is more important than outcome. 
   When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
   
   
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). 
   Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
   
   
5. Go deep. 
   The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
   
   
6. Capture accidents. 
   The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
   
   
7. Study. 
   A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
   
   
8. Drift. 
   Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
   
   
9. Begin anywhere. 
   John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
   
   
10. Everyone is a leader. 
    Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
    
    
11. Harvest ideas. 
    Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
    
    
12. Keep moving. 
    The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
    
    
13. Slow down. 
    Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
    
    
14. Don’t be cool. 
    Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
    
    
15. Ask stupid questions. 
    Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
    
    
16. Collaborate. 
    The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
    
    
17. ____________________. 
    Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
    
    
18. Stay up late. 
    Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.
    
    
19. Work the metaphor. 
    Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
    
    
20. Be careful to take risks. 
    Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
    
    
21. Repeat yourself. 
    If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
    
    
22. Make your own tools. 
    Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
    
    
23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. 
    You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
    
    
24. Avoid software. 
    The problem with software is that everyone has it.
    
    
25. Don’t clean your desk. 
    You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
    
    
26. Don’t enter awards competitions. 
    Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
    
    
27. Read only left-hand pages. 
    Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."
    
    
28. Make new words. 
    Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
    
    
29. Think with your mind. 
    Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
    
    
30. Organization = Liberty. 
    Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’
    
    
31. Don’t borrow money. 
    Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
    
    
32. Listen carefully. 
    Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
    
    
33. Take field trips. 
    The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
    
    
34. Make mistakes faster. 
    This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
    
    
35. Imitate. 
    Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
    
    
36. Scat. 
    When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.
    
    
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
    
    
38. Explore the other edge. 
    Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
    
    
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. 
    Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
    
    
40. Avoid fields. 
    Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
    
    
41. Laugh. 
    People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
    
    
42. Remember. 
    Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
    
    
43. Power to the people. 
    Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

Bonus: Join me (hey, takes at least two to tango) on this exploration of viriditas. For those that want to delve more, I'm writing an email newsletter this spring that goes into more depth. It's also an experiment in generosity and circulation, so no strings attached. Sign up here.

I'm loving (and scheming up) live installations, urban games, interactive and outdoors art. This inspires:

Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop by Mike and Doug Starn "was constructed throughout the spring, summer and fall by the artists and their team of rock climbers. Set against Central Park and its urban backdrop, Big Bambú suggested the complexity and energy of an ever-changing living organism.

Big Bambú encompassed a vast network of 7,000 interconnected 30- and 40-foot-long fresh-cut bamboo poles, lashed together with 70 miles of nylon rope. An internal footpath artery system grew along with the structure, facilitating its progress. The artists and museum made the artery systems open to the public, allowing visitors to fully experience the living sculpture and thrill of being aloft within this artwork (100 feet above Central Park)." - 20X200 (their description, and they also offer photographic prints by the brothers of their Big Bambu installation)

Art Credits: First photo of Big Bambú via Luxist.com; second photo of land artist Andy Goldsworthy's Before the Mirror (of woven bamboo) via University of Michigan Museum of Art; 3rd photo Big Bambú (recreated for the Venice Biennale); last, Bamboo Sphere in La Bambouseraie d’Anduze photo by Sebastien Abric via www.fotopassion.fr

There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas - Steven Johnson

"There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas." - Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

I believe that sentence summarizes the book Where Good Ideas Come From, and also where I'm pouring my energy into. I can make out a Renaissance (or Golden Age) on the horizon, and I believe it'll thrive most lushly in generative ecosystems.

The word (and sensation of) symbiosis keeps cropping up.

"What makes the reef so inventive is not the struggle between the organisms but the way they have learned to collaborate--the coral and the zooxanthellae and the parrotfish borrowing and reinventing each other's work. This is the ultimate explanation of Darwin's Paradox: the reef has unlocked so many doors of the adjacent possible because of the way it shares." - Where Good Ideas Come From

One of the interrelated things I'm going to be doing is getting out and about to meet and work and share with people face to face.

Sort of the 'stranger comes to town' narrative. May include mobile cross-fertilization Salons, field trips, smell walks, walkshops, cowalking (rather than coworking indoors in one spot), and other experiential explorations.

First stop is New Orleans if you'd like to join me any time in second half of March. Possibilities in Las Vegas, Vermont (not sure where yet), Miami, Indianapolis, Moab,  Portland(I'll be there for Open Engagement Conference on art and social practice in May), soon or any city you suggest.

I think every place offers its own magic and signature. My initial inclination (fleshing out) is to incite experiments and explorations that spur spontaneity and inspiration that play out within any city space (including solo); then, add modules that are culture and city-specific. All guided by this observation of Marcel Proust: "The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

While I was tossing this idea about, I read that Cuban-American poet Virgil Suarez takes his students and takes them to visit a place where they are a "fish out of water."

". . . the objective is to travel to a place, not too far, that will make an emotional impact on you, the writer [any Author of Anything].

I think some of the best work I've produced comes from having explored such never-been-there territory. I feel this way about going to hospitals, attorneys' offices, mechanics, and certainly a morgue or cemetery." - Virgil Suarez, Now Write

Bonus:

"A while ago,  I rode through the desert with a man who had books on alchemy. But I wasn't able to learn anything from them."

"There is only one way to learn," the alchemist answered. "It's through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey. You need to learn only one thing more."

The boy wanted to know what that was, but the alchemist was searching the horizon, looking for the falcon.

"Why are you called the alchemist?"

"Because that's what I am."

"And what went wrong when other alchemists tried to make gold and were unable to do so?"

"They were looking only for gold," his companion answered. "They were seeking the treasure of their Personal Legend, without wanting actually to live out the Personal Legend." - The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

the future of us = wonder year(s) and experiments in imaginal science

"The Wonder Year project is an invitation to imagine what lies beyond the apparent boundary of 2012, not as a rigidy imposed concept or prediction, but as an adventure." - The Wonder Year

I adore invitations and adventure, so this The Wonder Year (via Spaziale blog) caught my eye today; I'm still investigating it for myself.

Two days ago, I conceived of a mini-adventure inspired by a book's premise that I'd like to share.

In The Future of Us, teenage protagonists Josh and Emma live in 1996, and find out that Emma's computer can mysteriously access Facebook fifteen years in the future. Facebook doesn't exist in linear time, yet inadvertently or not, they're reading their own future-self Facebook statuses. They begin to piece together a puzzle of their lives as grown-ups.

In 1996, taking the best educated guess I could at the time, I'd be starkly wrong about the ride into 2011 on almost every single front I'd hazard a guess.  Rather than 15 years fast-forward, even 10-year-sprees are daunting: I was pretty much the same person with same worldview in 1996 as in 1986 so extrapolation sort of works for that time span. But 2006? That was night-and-day from 1996.

Eight years and exactly one day ago today, I published my first post here at Crossroads Dispatches. (Previous blog lasted a few months.) Could I predict I'd still be writing right here same bat-channel eight years later?

I'm startled myself how skimming (I didn't read it through as it's more suited to YA) The Future of Us got me going on this theme about how we believe we can or ought to predict or shape destiny. Notions such as there is a singular optimum destiny and we must finagle to get there. Or fearsome other destinies we must avoid. It opens up a ball of wax to play with.

I just didn't know what I didn't know back then, and actually couldn't conceive of many of the events and insights that have occurred (and I've left out a lot of juicy, weird parts). Mind and spirit may not be static. Maybe we aren't confined by our 17-year-old beliefs, or even yesterdays'.

"Many times I imagined myself here--at the threshold of the palace. But I always thought I would be here as a conqueror, instead we are the Earth king's personal guests here to serve him tea. Destiny is a funny thing." - unnamed character in Avatar: The Last Airbender

Destiny is a funny thing.

"Now, we have to do something. It doesn't have to be huge, but something we weren't going to do before playing this game."

"Emma, I'm not messing with the future. Not as part of a game."

"Then don't call it a game!" she snaps. "Think of it as an award-winning science experiment."

Emma picks up the thin blue vase from her dresser. Earlier this week, it held the dying roses Graham gave her for prom. Emma slowly tips the vase until water begins dribbling onto her white carpet.

"What are you doing?" I ask. But I know the answer. She's making a small change in the present to see how it affects the future. If I grab the vase from her now, it wouldn't matter because that wouldn't have happened before either. - The Future of Us, by Jay Asher and Carolyn Macker

In the book, Emma and Josh started to notice that things they'd decide in the present would ripple into the future each time they hit refresh on Facebook--sometimes affecting the name of their spouse,  the town where they reside, who's on their Friends list and who isn't and other factors.

The Invitation and Adventure. Try on this experiment in imaginal science. Less manipulating the future, more an exercise in imagination, at least for me--but play it as you will.

What did you do today that rippled into the future? As Emma notes, "It doesn't have to be huge, but something we weren't going to do before playing this game."

I like the ring of "hindsight is 20/20" so I'm setting my future statuses for the year 2020. Oh, and I'm not necessarily going to stay within the realm of "the feasible."

Add yours in Comments section below if you want to play too. (You can also invent the present-day statuses, if you like.) I'll play for about 10 or 11 days through February 19th--adding my statuses to the Comments. In a few days, I'll add yet another twist to the game inspired from the book, The Future of Us. Here's an example:

Yesterday: For the past year, nearly every day I walk 1 and 1/2 hours in pretty much the southerly direction in the same neighborhood. Today I walked a new northern route (I'd explored pieces of it years ago; today, I went further). And found a biking trail I didn't know about. It gave me a vantage point to see palatial 'star' homes that are often obscured by gates and walls.

In 2020: Jaunt through forests near Mogollon Rim. Built a fire for the evening. I'll travel again at dawn. (The unspoken, implied part is totally comfortable with wilderness survival in winter.) Photo attached with status update: Mongollan Rim and the Verde River.

ART CREDITS: Illustration by Katsuhiro Otomo via darksilenceinsuburbia; Bâtiment (Building) Installation, by Leandro Erlich, grants super-powers to passersby -- scale a building in Paris through March (a vertical mirror reflects a horizontal building facade) via MyModernMet.

spirited away by dragon adventures and ego dystonic fevers

The ruins of the once center of the cosmopolitan world Byzantium Empire are underground in Istanbul.

Paradoxically, antique and precious things aren't the only thing underground.

Often new and too edgy things reside underground.

Although, I'm tiring of hiding underground.

Perhaps it is the function of artists, shamans and culture-makers to be culturally dystonic:  To be too edgy--not by force or contrivance but simply because you are going with the dynamic of life (go ahead and rock the boat, surf the edges).

Heck, it's a dragon year in the Chinese zodiac. It's a year of adventure. No time to be tentative and timid like Ms. Chihuro in Spirited Away. She was having none of it, sulking in the backseat as they drove to their new home.  Her parents said a new school could be an adventure (ya right?). Little could she foresee her dread of the unknown would be tested by far more intimidating tests than any grade school.

Switching cartoons for a minute. I know it's been ages since you watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, if you've ever have.

There's a particular scene where one character does something so uncharacteristic, they faint immediately after, and in the next scene are bedridden with fever. A second character offers them support and wisdom in this dialogue (changed two words so I don't spoil the story for you):

You should know this is not a natural sickness. But that shouldn't stop you from enjoying tea.

What's happening?

Your critical decision. What you did beneath that lake, it was in such conflict with your image of yourself, that you are now at war within your own mind and body.

What's that mean?

You are going through a metamorphosis, my friend. It will not be a pleasant experience. But when you come out of it, you will be the beautiful person you were always meant to be.

Pretty much nails how I've been feeling. That sort of fever, but not quite a fever. An intense battle of my own self-images (self-mirages) clasping and collapsing.

I learned a new word last week in Shamans Through Time. "Among the Sedang Moi, a person may even drink his own urine, in the hope that this act will so depreciate him in the sight of his divine sponsors that they will take back the power they had been given." An individual who feels called to be a shaman may commit suicide as an act of refusal. It's so anathema to my self-concept, even if it is ultimately "positive" (well, maybe "whole") it wrecks how I have fixated myself.

ego-dystonic /ego-dys·ton·ic/ (e´go-dis-ton´ik) denoting aspects of a person's thoughts, impulses, and behavior that are felt to be repugnant, distressing, unacceptable, or inconsistent with the self-conception.

For a person who prides themselves on their cocky persona being compassionate might be repugnant, so ego dystonia looks unique to each. Ultimately no fixed image is going to do the river of you/us/I any justice.

Later, in the 1956 essay, George Devereux states, "shamanism is often also culture dystonic." The arts are dystonic.  Who we really are is dystonic.

Recently, I read Tara Mohr contend that actually there are two flavors of fear, first is akin to worry about an imagined future fate. The second kind:

"This is the word used in the Old Testament whenever people encounter something sacred. When Moses meets the burning bush, he feels “yirah.” Yirah is described as a kind of trembling awe we feel when we are in the presence of the sacred. It is also described as “the fear that comes over us when we are inhabiting a larger space than we are used to.” - Tara Mohr

The fear that comes over us when we inhabit spaciousness, when we are the sacred.

The Evolution of Culture and The Evolution of Creativity chapters in British-Israeli physicist David Deutsch book, The Beginning of Infinity, asserts that shame and taboo are the primary tools used to keep individuals and society comfortable (or confined, depending on perception) in our conclusions and self-conceptions. In other words,  tools to avoid the fever of dystonia, resist evolution, hem life.

Deutsch shares:

"Therefore no society could remain static solely by suppressing new ideas once the have been created.

That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change -- a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always -- and can only be -- to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.

How is this done? The details are variable and not relevant here, but the sort of thing that happens is that people growing up in such a society acquire a set of values for judging themselves and everyone else which amounts to ridding themselves of distinctive attributes and seeking only conformity with the society's constitutive memes. They not only enact those memes: they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them. So, not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety and devotion to duty, their members' sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards. People know no others. So they feel pride and shame, and form their aspirations and opinions, by the criterion of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society's memes." - David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

Culture is a funny thing. In the West, they view dragon as adversary to be slayed, and in the East, dragons are harbingers of fortune and magic.

The dragon? It has no way of knowing, really, which culture you hail from. It just rides life.

Your humble wood dragon,
Evelyn

Bonus: Self as a verb instead of self as an image is beautifully explained by Adyashanti in a January 18, 2012 webcast (available for sale) titled, "The Whole Notion of Self." (Scroll through titles on the right sidebar on the Radio Archives page.)

p.s. Yes, this is a very much an explaining post. Setting up context for what in near-future may look like up-ending memes and conceptions that have been handed down as gospel. In the end it's an experiential process of discovery that I really can't tell you about, and why I'm moving more toward exploring posts.

p.p.s. The young girl in the film was modeled after a real girl. If you've never seen Spirited Away it's a real treat for the imagination. It's been voice-overed in English by Pixar/Disney, and it is the top revenue film in Japan of all time.

Art credits: Built during Byzantine Emperor Justinian, this is a light art installation in the underground Basilica Cisterns in Istanbul (been collecting photos of Istanbul for a while, and lost the original source); illustration by Charles James Folkard via Dark Silence in Suburbia (great art blog that I follow); image of Chihiro riding a dragon from the movie, Spirited Away.

what can be explained is not poetry - w. b. yeats

“Publishing a volume of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo,” said author Don Marquis, speaking from experience. Something you’re considering, Leo, may seem to fit that description, too. It’s a project or action or gift that you’d feel good about offering, but you also wonder whether it will generate the same buzz as that rose petal floating down into the Grand Canyon. Here’s what I think: To the degree that you shed your attachment to making an impact, you will make the exact impact that matters most. Give yourself without any expectations.” - Rob Brezsny

I'm not a Leo per se, yet that truly spoke to me. And poetry is more than lyrics and lines, more fathomless in category as W.B. Yeats says, “What can be explained is not poetry.”

My last post here was back in October. Once I was locked out from updating (I hadn't paid my monthly fees), it didn't take long to see that I could appreciate a respite.

Recently, I picked up the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon series on DVD at the local library (no spoilers, I'm only 2/3 through). It begins in an alternate world with its own cosmology. This world is divided into four elements, with their attendant lands and kings. They are in the midst of a hundred-year war instigated by the Fire Nation wiping out many of the people and cultures in their world, including the Air Nomads and their temple.

A small tribe of Water people are deciding whether or not to banish a new-comer: a twelve-year-old named Aang whom might just be the Avatar (by balancing the four elements within himself, the Avatar can restore balance outside, ending the war). The debate ensues around whether he is too reckless to be among their serious warriors.

This is the dialogue that spoke to me, and I might just make it my mantra (internally) going forward:

Kitara: Don't you see? Aang's brought us something we haven't had in a long time. Fun.
Sokka: Fun? We can't fight Firebenders with fun!
Aang, the Avatar (smiling earnestly): You should try it sometime.

I can see some of you rolling your eyes at this point. Does it seem like fun = frivolous, or is it fun = harmonizing the imbalances in the world while having fun in the process? Fun = inventing and inspiring joyous ways of living?

This is where the line in the opening of the post: "It’s a project or action or gift that you’d feel good about offering, but you also wonder whether it will generate the same buzz as that rose petal floating down into the Grand Canyon" resounds. This blog, Crossroads Dispatches, celebrates it's 8th anniversary on February 6th. It's time for a shift that's closer to my gift: Less explaining, more exploring. To that end, I'm focusing on experiments in imagination and improvisation and fun; starting off easy and going into the more far-fetched and revolutionary as we go. That doesn't mean explaining shall never occur, but yeah, I'm aiming for exploratory, adventurous, experiential.

A glimpse of EXPLAINING:

"Today, the sci-fi novels of the sixties feel like artifacts from a distant age. "One way you can describe the collapse of the idea of the future is the collapse of science fiction," Thiel said. "Now it's either about technology that doesn't work or about technology that's used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories of 1970 was, like, "Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,' and in 2008 it was, like, 'The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confedereracy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun."

[Peter] Thiel's venture-capital firm, Founders Fund, has an online manifesto about the future that begins with a complaint: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." He believes that this failure of imagination explains many of the country's problems--from the collapse in manufacturing to wage stagnation to the swelling of the financial sector. As he puts it, "You have dizzying change where there's no progress."" - "No Death, No Taxes," The New Yorker, November 28, 2011

I don't relegate the dynamic of unfolding change to technology alone. I am more interested in questioning and stretching the horizons of the possible. Sometimes that is a simple shift of perception that affects identity, culture, and society.

Here's a glimpse of EXPLORING:

Speaking of sugared petals, here's an exercise:

imagine you are host to a 101-course meal (I believe Senia gave me this seed idea originally in NYC 2006 after an adventure in the Whitney Museum).

What might you serve?

Well, here's an actual 100-course meal conceived of by artist Mitchell Dose, held at West Bank Social Center, a  laboratory for social engagement in Minneapolis.

Spring roll, raisin, red pepper, Mung bean, tomato preserve,
pancake and mini pancake, maple syrup, kombucha, polenta rounds with basil and tomato, red Russian kale, thistle flower coffee, guava juice, blackberry, jalapeno, red currant, Morbier cheese, fennel seed were among the 100 bites of art offered.

Now imagine like the boys in Peter Pan that you too can be fed by the energy of envisioned food.

Or as Robert Irwin puts it, “It’s strange. With food, for instance, people seem able to understand what’s involved: you savor the taste rather than just feed the body. But people have a hard time understanding that it should be the same way with visual experience.”  Actually, I'd omit visual and broaden to "the same way with experience."

So now what might you serve that nourishes the senses, spirit and soul as well?

I'd have sugared rose petals.

And pinecone, an hourglass, peanut butter on a sterling silver spoon, a jar of royal blue moist tempura paint, match tea powder (unsteeped), a haiku printed on cloth, confetti, a pincushion stuck with pins with colorful threads through them, cottonball, typewriter ribbon, swim goggles, leaf, lit tealight candle, shower curtain ring, Pocky (Japanese snack), an ice cube... and on and on.

What would you serve?

p.s. Essence of exploration: The venue above, the West Bank Social Center’s tagline is 'UNPREDICTABLE THINGS ARE HAPPENING.'

p.p.s. Although I was not active on this blog, I have been on Tumblr. I have a free Tumblr blog on public space, public art, placemaking, reuse of empty spaces by the community, cities as software, urban interventions and improvisations. Also, it is very inspiring to follow certain search terms if you have an account on Tumblr, in particular "installation" is consistently amazing.

Photo credits: Deer Creek Canyon in Grand Canyon National Park panafoot on Flickr; sugared petals via encoreuneminute.tumblr.com

The self ended and the world began. - Louise Glück

‘What makes a really capable child give up in the face of failure, where other children may be motivated by the failure?’ - "The Effort Effect According to a Stanford psychologist, you’ll reach new heights if you learn to embrace the occasional tumble," Stanford Magazine, March/April 2007

*****

Young girl, small town, Siberia:

"Awestruck, she watched the animal trainers, the acrobats, the jugglers, and clowns. And then the lights dimmed and a spotlight shot upward and a lone woman climbed up a rope to a metal bar suspended far above the floor. Later Olga would learn that this wondrous sport was called "trapeze." But before she knew the word she knew her destiny. "That's for me!" she promised herself.

. . . Most circus performers come from circus families or have trained as gymnasts. Olga had neither circus connections nor gymnastics' training. She didn't even know where the nearest circus school was located. She had no allies. Her parents were conservative and practical. Her sisters, her grandmother, her friends were all walls she had to scale on her way to the trapeze. Even the friend who had recklessly lowered her onto a stranger's balcony in the middle of the night wouldn't help her run away to the circus.

Olga began to feel she had been born in exile, imprisoned and ignored. Her parents didn't take her pleadings seriously. No one understood her." - Dreams of the Solo Trapeze: Offstage with the Cirque du Soleil, by Mark Schreiber

*****

"The Census says that 5.9 million Americans ages 25 to 34 are living with their parents, an increase of 25 percent over from before the recession. Men are now twice as likely as young women to live with their parents.

. . . Only 55.3 percent of young adults 16 to 29 were employed, according to the Census, down from 67.3 percent in 2000 and again a post-World War II low. - "Editorial: Generation Needs More than a New Name," Willoughby, Ohio News-Herald, September 24, 2011

*****

You read this and it seems so... dim. According to some.

According to who?

Is it?

*****

"Young eagles have no instinctual fear when they emerge from the nest. They learn to avoid dangerous predators such as the wolf and fox, so Kazak hunters must climb to the nest and capture the juvenile eagle before it learns to fly -- when it is fearless. The Kazaks call the fledging a 'balapan', which they compare to a celestial raptor Hangaard (Khan Garuda). Living with an eagle may seem impractical - the raptor must be fed a marmot or a rabbit every other day and when it is cold in winter the nomads will sometimes feed it from their own flocks. The visible benefits of owning an eagle may not seem to tally with the cost, but what binds the Kazak to the eagle is something more than utility, it is what anthropologists call 'deep play.' The Kazaks say that the eagle 'chases away darkness from a man's heart.'"-- Hamid Sardar

*****

I had lost all sense of deep play when I lived in New York City.

I tried to make it--according to other people's terms.

I should have wisked away to the circus ;)

Get an playmate eagle.

Anything.

But NO it was black or white....

failure or success...

not growth.

(Ms. Carol Dweck, thank you for your research on growth mindsets.)

Students praised for performance and ability tend to want to continue receiving those kudos, and won't risk threaten their reputation as a smart cookie or as a success. "The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something" have been praised on process and effort, and they go for it for the pure privilege of growing. They'll look foolish. So what. Kids that were praised for performance tend to want to confirm their greatness, and kids praised for process seek activities that expand their abilities. (see also Little Bets, by Peter Sims)

Why, glory be, you are so successful!="All this implied that when students were valued for their intelligence, failures would be taken more personally, even as being disgraceful."

Whoa, look at you, you are learning!="Tend to view failures and setbacks as opportunies for growth. They have a desire to constantly challenge and stretch themselves."

*****

"Uranus thus confronts the Saturnian part of us that wishes to hold on, to maintain the status quo, to resist change in favor of security, tradition, and the established order.

The rebel-trickster side of the Prometheus archetype can thus come from within or without, and in the latter case a person can feel constantly subject to problematic changes that require one to reorient one's life. Whether these changes are precipitated by other people, by new psychological or physical conditions, or by external circumstances, their role is to open one's life to something new. If one is identified excessively with the past, if one tries to hold on to structures that are outmoded, then one will experience Uranus as a disruptive force that at times can be quite uncomfortable. But the potential is always there for one to integrate the archetype, and for one to contact one’s own capacity for freedom and excitement, for openness to the unexpected and the new.

When any planet is in major aspect to Uranus, that second planetary archetype tends to be liberated into expression, often in sudden, unusual, or unexpected ways. The second archetype is given an exciting, creative or innovative stimulation, and can be a source of both freedom and unanticipated change." - "An Introduction to Archetypal Astrological Analysis," Richard Tarnas, Ph.D.

*****

"Come to the edge" he said,
"We can't, we are afraid" they said...

"Come to the edge"
"We can't, we will fall"
"Come to the edge"
and they came
and he pushed them
and they flew.
- Guillaume Appollinaire

*****

(below fly w/audio-visual piece 'Olga' ... )

 

"After years of rampant consumerism and easy credit, such nascent initiatives speak to the new mood in Greece, where imposed austerity has caused people to come together — not only to protest en masse, but also to help one another." - "Battered by Economic Crisis, Greeks Turn to Barter Networks," NY Times, October 1, 2011

*****

". . . . Unlike most runaways, who are impelled by impulse, Olga postponed her departure for months. She would need at least a little money, and, not being a thief, would have to earn it. And she needed an act.

. . . For a few days she tried juggling with stones and fruit, but having no one to teach her, quit in frustration. She thought of animal acts. . .  Her father refused to buy her a dog so Olga went to Ishim and befriended a tiny shaggy mongrel she spotted at a refuse dump. It followed her home, where she washed it and named it "Lassie," after a dog she had seen in a movie.

Her father said, "You can't take care of yourself! How are you going to care for a dog?"

But Olga proved a good master and proceeded to train Lassie with a determined patience she rarely accorded humans. In no time Lassie was standing and playing dead. Olga would make her climb the stairs one at a time. If Lassie failed to stop on a step until given permission to continue, Olga would make her start all over. By the end of the month she had an act." -- Dreams of the Solo Trapeze: Offstage with the Cirque du Soleil, by Mark Schreiber

*****

"“I felt liberated, I felt free for the first time,” Mr. Mavridis said in a recent interview at a cafe in this port city in central Greece. “I instinctively reached into my pocket, but there was no need to.”

Mr. Mavridis is a co-founder of a growing network here in Volos that uses a so-called Local Alternative Unit, or TEM in Greek, to exchange goods and services — language classes, baby-sitting, computer support, home-cooked meals — and to receive discounts at some local businesses."

. . . For Ms. Houpis, the network has a psychological dimension. “The most exciting thing you feel when you start is this sense of contribution,” she said. “You have much more than your bank account says. You have your mind and your hands.”- "Battered by Economic Crisis, Greeks Turn to Barter Networks," NY Times, October 1, 2011

*****

"Now all [Olga] she needed was a train ticket to Tyumen, her first stop on the road to Moscow. She had no money of her own and certainly couldn't approach her parents. There weren't many jobs available for a young girl, and she was still attending school. She and her friends had brought lollipops from gypsies in Ishim, but none of the townspeople sold them. So one day Olga asked a gypsy woman how they were made and went in to business for herself, stealing sugar from her parents' kitchen. The first batch was awful, but the second was good enough to sell to her friends. Her father kept asking where all the sugar was going. To this day he doesn't know it financed her escape, the first yellow brick in her long road."  - Dreams of the Solo Trapeze: Offstage with the Cirque du Soleil, by Mark Schreiber

*****

Exactly one year ago today I was living in NYC.

I'm not sure if I were there today I would be part of the Occupy Wall Street protest.

protest (etymology of the word:)

mid-14th century (implied in protestation) "solemn declaration," from Latin protestari "declare publicly, testify, protest," from pro- "forth, before" + testari "testify," from testis "witness" (see testament).

my public declaration

I can certainly identify with many of the frustrations of the protesters. I was broke, I was running out of options: tried and tired all the grant proposal crayon inside the line forms, tried potential investors (long story, 'twas a media venture), tried X and Y and Z's and Kickstarter and plain hustle. Gave up. Try the government. Trudged to the food stamp office, uh-huh so they'd alert my landlord, and that would send them red flags (I was month-to-month, not on a lease) -- so there goes that. I'd never felt so powerless. So I left NYC before rent was due up again. I did not Make It in America. Near penniless with just enough for airfare, I moved in with family across the country.

(btw, I'm only able to share this aloud now since I've shifted into

a growth mindset...

even if the USA is predominantly a fixed mindset...

it's

a #

not me

although one can fixate on poor too)

So yeah, I can certainly identify.... and yet....

I am not 1%. I am not 99%.

I am the 100%--and I don't see that message conveyed much.

Except I just did when I read this. There are instances... for instance, that one woman.. you'll recognize her when you get to that point in the story below (and this again is an excerpt of a longer piece) conveys the I am the 100%:

"We stood there for a while, and when it started to rain, we got under an umbrella with an older, white couple who looked to be in their mid-sixties or so. Then they walked up to a police officer, spoke to him, and he motioned for them to approach the ranking officer in front who was standing with a bullhorn. We then saw this couple walk out of the netted area and leave.

At this point, Rebecca and I walked up to the same ranking officer and politely requested to leave. We were told no and to get back in the crowd. We overheard two officers holding the netting asking each other what they were going to do with all these people. They obviously had no idea what the leadership’s strategy was, if any. We then went under the umbrella of a group of young women who were in their teens and twenties and were talking to a detective (or someone with the NYPD who was wearing an overcoat). He asked us some very leading questions: “Are you all together?”, “So no one told you to disperse?”, “Did you know you would end up here?” We said we had no idea what was happening. Then he told us to talk to the same ranking officer with the bullhorn. This time when we approached, the cops gave him a signal and he motioned for us to all pass through. Just like that.

As we were leaving, I asked one of the women what she had said to the officers before we came over and why they had let us go. She said she had struck up a conversation with an officer and told him he was “beautiful” and a “beautiful person” and that the “love and good vibes” she had sent his way seemed to have an impact on him."

Alas, in the next sentence the writer belittles

the magic and power of the 100%...

the compassion of unconditional love and remarks in response

to the truthfulness of that woman, she adds: "Oh, I’m sure."

It's so easy to be jaded.

Dig deeper. Be still. Feel the undercurrent.

Be sure of love. It's there's 100%.

 *****

Olga calmly told her parents she was running away to circus school one day in August.

"Let her go," he told his wife, whose tearful pleading was no more effective than his own threats. "She'll be back tomorrow."

. . . . She was fourteen years old.

Olga Sidorova became a trapeze artist with Cirque du Soleil for many years.

Today, she teaches master classes at the aerial dance studio and school she founded in Sydney, Dancing in the Air.

*****

There were too many roads, too many versions.
There were too many roads, no one path--

And at the end?

16.
List the implications of "crossroads."

Answer: a story that will have a moral.

Give a counter-example.

17.
The self ended and the world began.
They were of equal size,
commensurate,
one mirrored the other.

-- a small snippet from poem Prism by Louise Glück from the book Averno

*****

The depths go deeper at psychopomp http://tinyletter.com/eve11

*****

ART CREDITS: High Trapeze, 1904, by Sidney Sime via Random Index blog; Kazak Eagle Master - Delouin, Bayin Olgii - 2003, by Hamid Sardar; 'Olga' video by filmmaker Marc Silver for Cirque du Soleil; photo from Olga Sidorova's site; Hecate's crossroads via The Inner Journey: The Moon,  Mythology and You blog

I'm not going to wait twenty years to see if we can make a living off what we do. - Guy Laliberté

The only place I found in Las Vegas that feels like my kind of 'home' is a cafe (and Red Rock Canyon). The owner is Brazilian, and opened the Sambalatte "lounge" as he named it, one year ago. No doubt naysayers thought September 2010 was a horrible time to open a coffee shop--pastries, cappuccino and chatting all discretionary luxury in times that sees Vegas with the worst unemployment rate (14.2%), the most foreclosures; the state of Nevada has the number one spot in terms of declining income, and second state in terms of poverty rate increases of the nation.

Yeah, whatever they said, he did it anyhow.

And, I can state that Sambalatte is always bustling and buzzing. I've never seen the place even slightly waning in traffic.

So, over a week ago there, I languidly pick up a book in their community bookshelf titled Cosmos and Psyche. The gist is the author applies Jungian microcosm and macrocosm archetypes of the history of the modern individuated man (roughly the year 1496 with Pico della Mirandola's manifesto Oratio ) against the cosmic planetary alignments in those five hundred years. Author Richard Tarnas concludes that right now is identical to cosmic archetypes and planetary alignments with the attendant tensions and tumult that catalyzed the High Renaissance five hundred years ago, stating "this too was an epoch of extraordinary turbulence and uncertainty, and also of great cultural creativity and dynamism."

In my world, it is a ripe time for Renaissance.

And it's also why my G+ tagline is Renaissance gal.

*****

"What would you write about if you could start over with a blank slate?

No preconceived notions. No promises. No history. No expectations from your readers. Starting from zero, right here, right now."

- Ev Bogue on Google+ yesterday

*****

  
"To answer that call meant gambling everything Cirque had earned so far."

I originally began to be intrigued with the back story of Cirque du Soleil because of a new project (more soon--next post). By serendipity, while browsing a local magazine at the wonderful Sambalatte (see above), I read:

"Twenty-four years ago, Guy Laliberté developed Cirque du Soleil with a grant from the Canadian government. The former street performer intended for his creation to last only a year, but the popularity was unprecedented. Cirque du Soleil continued to perform and Las Vegas is now home to seven Cirque shows. Forever on the cusp, the performance company and its founder recently achieved two new milestones.

In September 2009, Laliberté left behind this planet for a new adventure. Boarding a Russian Soyuz Capsule, he was launched 220 miles above Earth. During his space flight, Laliberte took hundreds of photos that would eventually become a coffee-table book called Gaia. Proceeds from the limited-edition book will be donated to his foundation One Drop, which is dedicated to bringing safe and clean drinking water to disadvantaged communities." - Vegas Rated, Issue 1, September 2011

In a book I just checked out from the library, we harken back to 1987 when Cirque was invited to perform for the first time ever outside Canada. But the LA festival didn't exactly want to pay for their travel expenses. Conundrum: ""I thought, 'I'm not going to wait twenty years to see if we can make a living off what we do. The opportunity is here, let's make a deal. I told Thomas Schumacher, 'Give us the opening slot, promotion, and one hundred percent of the gate.'"

. . . The simple truth is, at that particular moment in Cirque du Soleil's history, it could only afford a one-way trip to Los Angeles. Transporting the cast, crew, and equipment across the continent from Montreal to Los Angeles stretched Cirque's finances to the very limit. If they didn't earn enough money at the gate, Cirque could not afford to return home. Cirque du Soleil would end there." - Cirque du Soleil: 20 Years Under the Sun--An Authorized History, by Tony Babinski

(In retrospect, LA Festival organizer Thomas Schumacher says it was the worst deal he ever made. Guy Laliberté says, smiling, "He thought he was saving money, but he could have made a bundle if he'd kept part of the gate.")

*****

"The greatest audacity is the riskiest. In 1987, Guy Laliberté bet everything on that first trip to Los Angeles. Negotiations with the L.A. Arts Festival had been spotty: Guy felt the Festival wasn't prepared to share Cirque's enormous financial risk in traveling to the States. So they decided to go it alone, making Cirque a "fringe" event, the Festival providing only ticketing services, promotion and a listing in their catalogue. It was also agreed that Cirque du Soleil would do the opening of the Festival. Getting to L.A. cost Cirque every penny it had; if Cirque failed, Guy knew he'd have to sell the tent just to get the artists home. Audacity won.

Audicity. Audicity. Audacity. Use the word often enough, it turns into gibberish, a meaningles sneeze. What in the Sam Hill does it mean?

Franco thinks a minute. Audacity is rejecting everything you have done before, he says.

Even if it worked." -- Cirque du Soleil, edited by Veronique Vial and Helene Dufresne 

*****

 "[Renaissance artists] understood the imagination as a magical power that can “lure and channel the energies of the anima mundi.” - Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee

That sentence is the main theme I'm working with lately. Did the original Renaissance just 'happen', or was it lured into form by pure vision of each as powerful as a magical incantation?

*****

One story from Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries by Peter Sims:

Pixar was coming off a three hit homerun, and hired Brad Bird as a director who was coming off a Warners Brothers failure, The Iron Giant. Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, and John Lassiter told Bird, "The only thing we're afraid of is complacency--feeling like we have it all figured out. We want you to come shake things up. We will give you a good argument if we think what you're doing doesn't make sense, but if you can convince us, we'll do things in a different way," Bird told Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Hayagreeva Rao. "For a company that has had nothing but success to invite a guy who had just come off a failure and say, 'Go ahead, mess with our heads, shake it up'; when do you run into that?"

Bird's ideas for The Incredibles were estimated to cost $500 million and take ten years to accomplish based on current processes. If and only if he could figure out how to lower those estimates, he could proceed with his vision of numerous, rich characters. "In order to help shake things up, one thing Bird did was to seek out people within Pixar who he described as black sheep, whose unconventional views could help find solutions to the problems. "A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things," Bird said. "We gave black sheep a chance to prove their theories and we changed the way a number of things are done here." Eventually, Bird's vision for The Incredibles was within technical and fiscal reach and ended up being cheaper per minute than Pixar's previous movie.

Ed Catmull studied Toyota's concept of a learning organization after watching computer graphics giants (once) like Evans and Sutherland and SGI fail despite their lead and despite access to great talent. (I once worked for E&S, before I got into all things Internet.) They are okay talking about mistakes, and there is a cultural "willingness to be challenged."

*****

 

 

"Come my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world." - Tennyson 

*****

"I founded Charles Schwab in 1974, when America was confronting a crisis of confidence similar to today's. We had rapidly rising inflation and unemployment, economic growth grinding into negative territory, and paralyzed markets. The future looked pretty bleak.

Sound familiar?

Yet I had faith that our economy would recover. My vision was simple: Investors deserve something better than the status quo. I launched the company with four employees, a personal loan on my home, and an audacious dream. I didn't know exactly how we were going to do it, nor could I foresee that over the decades we would end up building a business that serves over 10 million accounts. But we went for it." - "Every Job Requires An Entreprenuer", by Charles Schawb, Wall St. Journal, September 28, 2011

*****

  "Personal Renaissance", by James Burns and the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and 1500 people who worked on it. The Mural Arts program employs prisoners, addicts, and youth who previously spent time in juvenile detention "in a way a regular employer might not. Later on, the program helps them find long-term work." - Yes , Fall 2011

"Great art is never silent, can't be ignored, and serves poorly the status quo." - Philadelphia Mural Arts Program

*****

Ellen Kullman was a VP running a $2 division and managing about 6,000 employees at DuPont, when her manager asked her if she would start a new services division from stratch. When she said yes, half her peers believe she'd been summarily demoted; "the other half thought I was crazy." Her story sums up:

"I don't know if I would have become CEO if I hadn't done this. When you're an engineer, you learn to go with your head. When you're starting something new, you have to go with your gut, too. We're a 209-year-old company. We won't make it to 300 if we only ask, is my polymer better? Now when I go through strategy reviews, I say, 'That's what it is. What could it be?'" - "DuPont's Ellen Kullman on Her Risky Path to the CEO Job", Bloomberg Businessweek, September 19, 2011

 "Life should be lived on the edge of life.

You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope."

- Philippe Petit, who walked across the twin towers on a tightrope in 1974, in the documentary Man on Wire

*****

"All the things that really matter to us are impossible, you know. They say translation is impossible; sure it is. We do it because it's necessary, not because it's possible.

Writing poetry is impossible. I don't know how to write a poem. A poem--there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don't know. There is so much that comes out of wht we don't know and what we don't have any control over. I think that is one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility." - W.S. Merwin, poet laureate and Pulitizer Prize winner in interview, Yes magazine, Fall 2011

*****

"If you put off everything until you're sure of it you'll get nothing done."

- Norman Vincent Peale

ART CREDITS: 1000 Ways to Escape by Souther Salazar; photo of O Cirque du Soleil show at Bellagio hotel via BestofLasVegas.com; Flickr photo of Rainbow Village by zosoiv7, "this tiny village in Taichung, Taiwan was painted by Mr. Huang Yongfu, an original native of Hong Kong";  it was once known as a military dependents’ village but the painter, 86, covered every square inch in art (via HonestlyWTF blog) ; Before That Dream is Tamed, by Souther Salazar; Personal Renaissance mural by James Burns and the city of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program

Before I die I want to ______

Before I die I want to.... that was the question sitting there blank on the blackboard. The answer not to be engraved in stone, a fixed and unmoving testament. Just chalk--so it's okay to morph it, play it by ear and adjust to the rhythm of life. I was intrigued by Candy Chang's interactive art projects, as I flipped through the magazine:

"Through a series of large-scale projects that combine installation art with social activism, Chang has encouraged people to engage with public spaces to let their voices be heard. In 2008, while living in New York, she invited Brooklyn residents to anonymously reveal their rental costs on sticky notes posted on a local storefront—helping them determine the fair market value of their apartments. In 2011 she constructed a blackboard over an abandoned house in her current city of New Orleans, stenciling it with the phrase BEFORE I DIE I WANT TO.... Passersby wrote in answers like "go to school," "feed an elephant," and "understand," in chalk. Chang says the project served as a reminder of "what matters to people as individuals and as a community." - Oprah Magazine, "How Candy Changs Public Art Projects Are Changing Communities Everywhere," September 2011

Somehow that story reminded me of at least two things (plus a few interactive art projects I'd been musing around). Before I die, I want to get back to New Orleans to culminate a creative project I started there. Preferably way way before I die, like more like next month. October 2011.

Before I die, I want to be real. In the interest of saving face (clients and potential employers Google our names and hold our vulnerabities and voice against us as I've been told by HR folks...) I've not been sharing much of myself over the last three years. Screw it, I can't pretend and I can't live that way (i.e. meekly, in hiding). Plus, context is everything, and since this site is 100% coming from my lens, my voice, it helps to have a glimpse where I'm coming from and going to.

This is a question I got in my inbox a few months ago from a reader:

Question: So I'm curious if you've jumped off the Silicon Valley treadmill permanently or just recharging the batteries before taking another shot at it?

I jumped off in late 2004, ever since the surviving the tsunami, I've never again been attracted to that world, but I also try not to be repelled by it either. I was set up to start a firm with some friends, the four of us were going to do a consulting and coaching practice around social media for business when we all came back from holidays, etc. to kick off Jan 2005. Not.

Obviously too much coincidence to just happen to be in Thailand, just happen to be on the beach, when such an unmistakable wake-up call knocks on one's door. I don't exactly go to Thailand every day, or any of the other nations hit [by the Indian Ocean disaster on December 24, 2004].

The peace came because having witnessed the enormity of that disaster and its aftermath (I returned a year later in Dec 2005 for nine weeks), I immersed myself in a monastic life for the next 16 months. My main thing has been enlightenment/self-realization/whatever-name-you-give-it since that time, everything else is a backdrop. Luckily, I didn't leave Bay Area right away as that is where I found my teacher, Adyashanti.

Speaking of Before I Die, I Want to.... this oldie blog post came up as something to share. Especially for those of you who have only been reading for a couple of years. Wow, and Geshe Michael Roach shows up in it pretty prominently in this post after I rustle it up and skim it. I only just re-read my favorite chapter (on the Economics of Limitlessness) and promptly wrote to his office two months ago. I want him to come speak in New Orleans. Why? A hunch.

"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

August 11, 2005

If Not on the Day I Die, Then Not Today

There's a practice called "Death Meditation" in Tibetan monasteries. The idea you get in your mind when you hear that phrase is probably lying down on a cold piece of sidewalk somewhere  and trying to imagine a lot of tubes up your nose, relatives crying at your side, and heart monitors going off with a beeping sound. But this is not the point at all. To put it simply, you just wake up in the morning and stay there in bed, lying down, without opening your eyes. And you say to yourself: "I'm going to die tonight. What would be the best thing to do with the rest of my time?" via Geshe Michael Roach, The Diamond Cutter

Which is eerily similar to this quote I referenced the other day from Steve Jobs:

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself:  "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.  - Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford commencement speech

I suppose you might get the urge to to try skydiving that day, or maybe go sing in a karaoke bar, or get the most expensive tickets to a Broadway play (assuming there's a matinee). The Death Meditation practice has to be done on a regular basis, over an extended period of time - and that's when it has its strongest effect. One result you'll find comes pretty quickly is that you streamline your life: You cut out the things that you own or do that slow you down...

If you were really going to die tonight, would you sit and read through the whole Sunday paper, or most of the magazines you subscribe to? Would you really surf around the TV looking desperately for anything of even minor interest? Would you still go out and spend an hour or two at lunch or dinner, gossiping about the other managers. Decide then: If not on the day I die, then not now either. Because, frankly, it may really be today. - Geshe Michael Roach, The Diamond Cutter

I read these words last night.

I did the Death Meditation this morning. I did not have an intense desire to beam myself to the Parthenon in Greece (I'm an ancient civilization junkie) or bask in the glow of the Taj Mahal at dawn. I'd no desire to bungie-jump into a canyon, or race a car at top speed across the glistening salt flats. You'll say this is only because I've already done many exotic or biochemical fueled adventures. Yes. Run Boston Marathon, check. Run fifty-milers weaving through mountain ridges, below glaciers, facing oceans and fjords, check. Run intense white water, check. Run off to Prague, Hong Kong, Venice, Bangkok, Oaxaca, Tokyo, Auckland, check. Run through matchbox villages, hidden serene canyons, fern chocked valleys, check. Yes - and no. With all I've done there was still...well, more I wanted.

Or was it less?

There was a practical  part of me well aware that I have to wrap up my presentation for the BlogBusinessSummit by tomorrow. Can I make the presentation memorable so that if it was the last thing I did it would be worthwhile? So many folks whip together a few bullet points with little feeling for what they are leaving behind. And then there are presentations that seep into you like Julie Leung's on the social masks we wear (you had to be there because the visuals and Julie's presence are inextricable; but here's the audio).

There's a few things I won't get to by tonight. Beginning the book that won't go away or this new blog I'm working on launching. That's ok. But could write a poem. Better yet revise that poem I'm working on. Get the class blog up and share the poem (for my fellow Taos Summer Writers Conference's The Yoga of Writing students). Today.

And if this was the last post I wrote would it be reflective of what I am for? I think of this not only because of this Death Meditation, but I was reminded of it reading Steven Vincent's last post last week (more context: my RIP post). Yes, at any time this could be my last post. That's not meant to stop me dead in my tracks. Unperfect is what blogging is all about (as Tom Guarriello and I joked at a Starbucks in Manhattan when I meant to say imperfect!). There are days where I rant and days I whine. So I wondered: What was my very last post before the tsunami? Yes, thankfully, it's precisely what I'd have left behind. It's titled: A Story of Peace and Goodwill.

I read about the concept of survivor's guilt the other day (why am I alive when all these others perished?). Strange, I don't feel guilty about surviving the tsunami. My heart goes out to those who lost loved ones and those we lost. I do feel like I have a responsibility to really live and to give and to share.

But the honest truth is I don't feel the quite the same urgency as I did in, say, January without constant reminders.

This morning as I laid there I thought of calling up a few family members and friends and catching up with personal email (including to some of you out there). I called up a friend to go on a hike this afternoon. It's not about the hike, though.

I won't get to it all today, but I get a chance to die again. I hope.

p.s.  Just finished The Diamond Cutter (and am still too spellbound to do a proper review). It's hands down the best business book I've read this year - maybe ever. If it matters at all Roach was founder of Andid International Diamond Corporation which has sales in excess of one hundred million dollars a year. He started out as an errand boy (ok, not your typical errand boy - he'd been Princeton-trained and is an ordained Tibetan Buddhist monk). 

ART CREDITS: All photos are of Candy Chang's work and from Candy Chang's website; her blog is here.

They had no problems understanding light speed and teleportation except that they could have done it more discreetly. - Malidoma Some

"The millet fileds were generous and the harvest was good. The hard work of collecting and transporting grain from the farm to the roof of the houses where it waited to be put into the granaries was over. Now, in the fallow season, the villagers turned their attention to spiritual matters, to initiation. The dry season would be painfully idle if there was nothing else to do. One afternoon I was sitting outside with my sister when a town crier came running to my father's house. In a Dagara village, the town crier is considered an envoy of the spirit. He does not greet people or otherwise behave normally, for he is possessed by the message he has been commissioned to convey. He appears very agitated while doing so because he is responding to what the spirits have told him to do.

Out of breath, he stopped in front of us, mumbled something, and drew a cross on the mud wall of the women's quarter. He said nothing, but instead sang a bizarre song. As he was about to go away, I stopped him.

"Wait a minute. What's all this about?"

"What? You don't know? Well, a child who lives in this house will become a man--if he lives that long. . ."

This answer transfixed me, I sat down. I had imagined that Baor was scheduled for the middle of the dry season.

Seeing my perplexity, my sister tried to clarify things for me. "You cannot be told about it until the day before. If you know ahead of time, something is wrong."

"So my initiation begins tomorrow--and I am not the least prepared for it."

"Your not knowing is your being prepared." [replied his sister] - Malidoma Some, Of Water and the Spirit

Now is the dry season. The millet harvest was good. The season of initiation for my eternal boy. Not just in the Northern Hemisphere. Or in the tribe of the Dagura of Africa. Here in the imaginal hemisphere, too.

Typically, I wouldn't be thinking what I was doing or who I was being ten years ago although the recent attention to 9/11 had that effect. Plus, the photographer Brooke Shaden wrote an open letter to her future self in ten years time.  

"I’d like to see the world, but not in the way that most people say they want to. I want to go places and sit in every open field I can find in each unique country and hear the wind talk to me." - Brooke Shaden, "34-Year-Old Me"

Ten years ago... ten years ago. I read both Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman as well as Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening by Andrew Harvey in the same time frame in the winter ten years ago while I lived in Salt Lake City and was still a computer engineer (unemployed) and still married (separated). Both books influenced my life by upending what I thought I knew about how the world works. Yet my life was already being upended as our startup closed up shop January 2001, I found looking for work as a former dot-com CTO daunting (the "new economy" was now a pariah in traditional IT circles) and my husband asked for a divorce.

I was more willing to listen to alternative answers than I'd been ever before. (The open-ended question I threw out was, "What is my purpose?"--pretty standard, yet almost any question will do....)

"So it comes to pass that, when we pursue an inquiry beyond a certain depth, we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life. The floorboards of the soul, to which we try to penetrate, fan open and reveal the starry firmament." -Bruno Schulz

Okay, I'm willing to listen. Maybe consensual reality maybe wasn't a fixed reality or reality, after all. 

"To a Dagura man or woman, the material is just the spiritual taking on form." - Malidoma Some

It also shook up my belief that everyone has pretty much the same universal world-view.

In a letter to a friend, Gustav Mahler reveals this about the composition of his Third Symphony, "I tell you in, at certain places in the score, a quite uncanny feeling takes possession of me, and I feel as if I had not created this myself." I would read things like this in 2001, and it'd sound romantic and soothing to hear--although, then, truthfully, I had no clue what Mahler meant.

So reading Of Water and the Spirit was like standing at the edge of a lake--the first body of water I'd ever set eyes on. Although no book is going to be an experiential dive, and until I at least dipped a toe, I would not know wetness. The book did, however, entice me to care about exploring and experimenting with wetness.

So, a few days ago in a Google+ exchange, someone was sharing how they were upset by a brand-new violent, pornographic game (or book?) and another person replied: "Words are wind." And added, that it doesn't matter what the content is as it's only make-believe.

"The world of the Dagara also does not distinguish between reality and imagination. To us, there is a close connection between thought and reality. To imagine something, to closely focus one's thoughts upon it, has the potential to bring something into being." - Malidoma Patrice Some

If I fully believed that words are 'merely' wind, I wouldn't be writing now nor ever. Although paradoxically, words are wind. It's only that many underestimate the power of Air.

In fact, there is a good deal the dismissive tone of the comment, "Words are wind" stirred a fire within me. Noting my anger I connected it with something a mentor of mine said recently, Stifled passion, sooner or later, ends up bursting out as anger. All which has catalyzed me to wholeheartedly commit to accomplishing a few "word as wind" projects with optional interactive elements that I've had on hold (for several reasons with "no money" among the excuses).

“Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive. Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence.” - Max Picard via Dennis Lewis, "Some Impressions on Words, Voice, Listening, and Silence"

"As in the case of "Star Trek," Westerners look to the future as a place of hope, a better world where every person has dignity and value, where wealth is not unequally distributed, where the wonders of technology make miracles possible. If people in the West could embrace some of the more positive values of the indigenous world, perhaps that might even provide them with a "shortcut" to their own future." - Malidoma Patrice Some

Bonus: Excerpt from Malidoma Patrice Some's introduction to his memoir here. It speaks to the fluidity of 'reality' and the power of imagination.

Announcing: I'm offering Tarot readings (the Tower archetype of 9/11 got me thinking about Tarot again) as a whimsical way to do a personalized consultation for your creative idea--be it a new business venture, new product line, or a Black Rock Arts Foundation grant proposal. Whatever you desire to make tangible through your sheer creative expression and exuberance. I'll throw in my own quirky amalgamations to the alchemical William Blake Tarot deck's two cents. All proceeds to fund a month-long online vignette du jour (there's more to it than that as you may infer from the above post) creative project using the setting of the city of New Orleans. (Thus, the tie-in with Tarot as Nola is where I learned the archetypal craft.)

ART CREDITS: All photographs on this post by Brooke Shaden. (Brooke's blog here.)

I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. - C.S. Lewis

"I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia." - C. S. Lewis

I didn't read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (2nd in The Chronicles of Narnia) as a child. In fact, I first cracked open the series only a few years ago. I did savor fairy tales and classic myth from globe spanning cultures such as Greek to Sumerian to Japanese to Navajo. (Sweet surprise! The book devas generously are gifting away all the Kindle versions of one of my childhood faves--Andrew Lang's The Green Fairy Book plus other colors of the prism.)

I'd read in many sources that it's worthwhile to recall childhood instincts and inclinations to reclaim natural, innate talent and delight as a potential livelihood. The most recent example I'd come across is real-world game designer (and motivational speaker) Jane McGonigal's story shared briefly in this excerpt:

". . . Jane’s first year in the real world [after college]—editing at a dot-com in New York, ruling out law school and publishing—left her feeling a little lost. One day [her sister] Kelly asked her, “As a child, what did you do that you loved?”

“Making up games and giving motivational speeches,” Jane answered. “But that’s not a career! Who does that?” - Elle magazine's article on Jane McGonigal

So it would seem that I applied the same logic, my conclusion should be read (and write) fairy tale and modern myth. (I'd probably lean toward the stylized parables that appeal to young and old, male and female, like The Alchemist.)

You'd think that's the logic if early innate inclinations are any clue.

Immersed (yet thoroughly trapped indoors as an eight-year-old), I imagined realms where I would saunter in adventures with elfs, unicorns, and undines well beyond the fortress walls of the concrete block house in our Miami suburb.

Even as a child, I wanted to live out an enchanting fairy tale in real life--no mere vicarious thrill would sate me.

Perhaps the closest that rings true (for me) is real-life mythic life and real-time writing of it. Yet to be honest, that feels like I am putting my very life, soul, heart, spirit, plus everything sacred and profane on the line. (Have you ever noticed how easy it is to scramble sacred and scared?) I tremble as if I'm staring down a dragon. Why so? I happened to read this recently, and it resonates:

"If you didn't know human nature, you might suppose that a single activity like painting, mountaineering, or writing could be treated separately, but the whole person is affected because the whole person is being expressed. (This is why it's said that you get to know yourself on the mountain or in front of the lank canvas.) Even if you pick a very narrow skill, like running a marathon or cooking, your whole sense of self shifts when you succeed with passion as opposed to failing or backing off.

The willingness to reach inside every part of yourself opens the door to total understanding. You place your entire identity on the line, not just an isolated part. This may sound daunting, but actually it's the most natural way to approach any situation. When you hold some part of yourself in reserve you deny it exposure to life; you repress its energy and keep it from understanding what it needs to know." - Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets (longer and worthwhile excerpt online)

Yes, yes, place your entire identity on the line.

".... it still matters what other people think, right?"

The pilgrimage shall in the mists of perceived time slay all identity. In the meantime, gumption and courage might have to do.

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius— and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction." - E. F. Schumacher

Bonus: Sharing inspiration behind new narrative 'game' (game as in leela) project on Google+, I  added:

"I'm working on this because it's the most challenging, riskiest, scariest thing I can think of to do among my livelihood options. Plus, if I live through it intact, it will take me to my edge while using my gifts."

Another Google+ post that peeps within one creative risk on my project.

Bonus: Click on this link to accept my invitation to you to join my private circle a.k.a. "creative cluster" for folks that congregate at this blog on Google+.

"Creativity is like breathing – pointers may help, but we do the process ourselves. Creative clusters, where we gather as peers to develop our strength, are best regarded as tribal gatherings, where creative beings raise, celebrate, and actualize the creative power which runs through us all." - Julia Cameron, A Guide for Starting Creative Clusters

p.s.  I am more partial to the first book The Magician's Nephew better than the more popular 2nd in The Chronicle of Narnia series, partially because it tells of the creation myth and authoring of the world of Narnia and of another world. All photos from the movie version, as well as movie stills from http://kingsandqueensofnarnia.tumblr.com.

I was doing what I could with what I had where I was. - Bob Dylan

I was doing what I could with what I had where I was. -- Bob Dylan

What Dylan replied when asked about the secret to his success.

That may be paraphrased as I had to jot it down quickly as I was passing through the casino mall. The point is it's exactly what I needed to hear today.

Drain my energy on whining about what I don't have, and who I can't afford to hire, and the imperfect conditions I'm in for inspiration to work, or whatever. Sure, been there done that. Or--I can do what I can with what I have right now.

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Above is an example of a public post I shared on Google+. They're shorter and tend to share a singular point rather my rambling shares over here. Note, if you check it out now, that I only be sharing about 30% publicly, the rest are private circles, including one circle (my largest, and hopefully the most active) I've set aside just for creative folks like you that visit here.

If you need a Google+ invite, please leave your name in comments below and I'll send you one, and add you to the fun and mystery-laden blog circle for everyone here.

The prime reason I'm keen on Google+ is it has features designed for interactivity in a way that a blog and/or an email newsletter is not. As Greg Christopher shares, "Google+ is a Salon in the old French style. It is a gathering place for people with something to say. People with opinions and a desire to interact with others. People who don't care that their grandma had cereal for breakfast before planting her farm on Farmville, as much as they care about connecting with other passionate people with something to say. It is a place where ideas have sex, to borrow from Matt Ridley. Where someone who is a Star Wars geek can talk to other Star Wars geeks. Where artists, journalists, philosophers, geeks, and freaks of all types can find their home. Where you can find your own community and talk to each other about precisely what you want to talk about."

So Crossroads Dispatches is more like the stage, and our private Google+ circle is more like the lobby... where connections and conversations actually happen informally.

p.s. I've also shifted the monthly subscription that deeply peers into the magic of our life with fellow peers and adventurers, Encanto, entirely over to a private Google+ (previously it was a private blog). There's currently a special for new Encanto subscribers where first trial month is only $12. Check out sample Encanto correspondence (from when 'twas bloggy).

ART CREDITS: Bob Dylan's album cover for The Basement Tapes; Anselmo Bucci's painting of La Coupole, Paris.

game-changing, or how to turn economic recovery into a multi-player game experience

"Game-changing."

You hear that term bandied about in innovation circles. In application, it isn't that frequent as "game-changer" implies something that leapfrogs one out of the lock of a current system, institution, industry, regime, paradigm and defines its own brand-new game. 

I hadn't connected the dots with the synchronicity of hints and winks that life is a grand "game" until recently.

I sat down to eat lunch the other day, and absentmindly (well, could almost replace instinctually or spontaneously with "absentmindedly") pick up the top magazine in my Mom's pile to browse through for eye-candy. (Not typical for me; if I am going to read while eating it would be the Internet.)

I open up her recent Elle to the story of Jane McGonigal. The article profiles her life and her purpose: fleshing out her childhood joy into a profession, announcing her new game company, showing how she got into real-world gaming (differs from video games in that it interleaves real-world issues and real-life experiences with game mechanics), and the head injury that instigated her latest game: one that helped her regain her joie de vivre and her health.

So I thought: what if we were to repurpose Jane's concept of "how to turn recovery into a multi-player experience" into "how to turn economic recovery into a multi-player experience?" And I don't mean recovery as in return to the past or status quo. Perhaps dynamically better than yesterday: I like what Umair Haque says here about the classic Greek principle of eudaimonia: "Eudaimonic prosperity, in contrast, is about mastering a new set of habits: igniting the art of living meaningfully well. An active conception of prosperity, it's concerned not with what one has, but what one is capable of."

I'd been thinking that economics and money touches just about everyone's life--okay, nix that for fairies, elves and dragons. But humans are fairly enthralled (dare I say, seduced) by this whole game of exchange of gifts that includes bits of colored paper and tinkling coinage.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Bucky Fuller

Backtrack a bit to May 2009, I was working on a grant proposal that tied into New Orleans' "Creative Recovery." (For context, "Creative Recovery" grants were through Transforma Projects mini-grants: "The Creative Recovery Mini-Grant program supported work produced at the intersection of art, social justice, and recovery in New Orleans. It fueled the recovery process with the energy of the local creative community by supporting the vibrant activity on the ground level.")

I realized after I'd dreamed it and written it up (then, reading the fine print) that I disqualified for applying for the grant as I was no longer a permanent resident (however, I was in New Orleans at the time). The seed of the idea kept tugging at me, so I wrote it up as a real-world game concept in February 2011. Here's the original Kickstarter project proposal here (unfunded); although, the concept has evolved considerably.

"The "next Google" is unlikely to be a search engine, however, just as the "next Microsoft" was not a desktop software company. I used competing directly with Google as an example of a problem with maximum difficulty, not maximum payoff. Maximum payoff is more likely to come from making Google irrelevant than from replacing it. How exactly? I have no more than vague ideas about that. I wouldn't expect to be able to figure out the right answer, just as I wouldn't have expected anyone to figure out in 1990 what would make Microsoft irrelevant. " - Paul Graham, entrepreneur, angel investor, and founder of the tech start-up incubator and education program, Y Combinator

At this point in my musing, I'm reacquainted with an old blogging buddy in his private Google+ circle last week, and he linked to the article below. (Worth reading the whole she-bang for context and inspiration.) My friend asks his circle how we might use Google+ to correspond with each other and take action towards life-enhancing visions of the world (or what I also call a Renaissance). That's when things get intriguing...

The article my Google+ buddy shared to kick off the private circle discussion:

"Put what, why, and who you love ahead of what, why, and who you don't, and your roadmap will begin to write itself.

Now, my little principle might cause those with hand-made suits and beancounterly tendencies to leap out of their chairs and hit me with the tarantallegra jinx. But even the cynics might be willing to admit: given a mysteriously non-recovering "recovery" for a global economy perpetually poised on the brink of perma-crisis, the status quo's out of ideas, out of options, and running out of time.

In an economy dedicated to the pursuit of more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier, the greatest hidden cost and unintended consequence is that something vital, enduring, resonant, and animating has gone missing from our lives — and it might just be the biggest thing: meaning in what we do, and why we're here." - Umair Haque, "A Roadmap to a Life that Matters," Harvard Business Review blog, July 13, 2011

I was surprised to see this article in the Harvard Business Review blog--it's a bit warm and fuzzy for HBR (at least the HBR that I recall from years ago)... although a great sign... sign... signal, design... as the article lays out a design intention as in William McDonough's mantra: "Design is the first signal of human intention."

Linked in the above post is Umair's post on eudaimonia, Greek philosophy of "a deeply fulfilled life", where Umair contrasts the trajectory we are on with what we may prefer to set into motion, into design. In my own blog (see purpose paragraph under the headline, Crossroads Dispatches), what he calls eudaimonia I've encapsulated as:

"A neo-renaissance, eco-epicurean savors, curates and shares slices from the surf's edge on the inspiration, imagination, the art of living, the living of art - and anything that screams Life."

"In short, I see an outcomes gap: a yawning chasm the size of the Grand Canyon between what our economy produces and what you might call a meaningfully well-lived life, what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia.

The economy we have today will let you chow down on a supersize McBurger, check derivative prices on your latest smartphone, and drive your giant SUV down the block to buy a McMansion on hypercredit. It's a vision of the good life that I call (a tiny gnat standing on the shoulders of the great Amartya Sen) hedonic opulence. And it's a conception built in and for the industrial age: about having more. Now consider a different vision: maybe crafting a fine meal, to be accompanied by local, award-winning microbrewed beer your friends have brought over, and then walking back to the studio where you're designing a building whose goal is nothing less than rivaling the Sagrada Familia. That's an alternate vision, one I call eudaimonic prosperity, and it's about living meaningfully well. Its purpose is not merely passive, slack-jawed "consuming" but living: doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing — all the stuff that matters the most.

. . . .  Though it harks back to antiquity, eudaimonia's a smarter, sharper, wiser, wholer, well, richer conception of prosperity. And deep down, while it might be hard to admit, I'd bet we all know that our current habits are leaving us — have left us — not merely financially and fiscally broken, but, if not intellectually, physically, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually empty, then, well, probably at least just a little bit unhealthy. Eudaimonic prosperity, in contrast, is about mastering a new set of habits: igniting the art of living meaningfully well. An active conception of prosperity, it's concerned not with what one has, but what one is capable of." - Umair Haque, " Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Living?," Harvard Business Review blog, May 12, 2011

So this is a backstory on the genesis of the game. I've a few ideas for an enchanting real-world game that'd be worthwhile for each of us individually--and widening the circle, collectively. I think the "economic" recovery is a matter of re-imagining our present and future as to what we would truly desire no holds barred, rather than constantly extrapolating scenarios of the past onto the future.

To tie this in all together to the present day, Google+ could be an effective way to communicate with our "allies" (i.e. us) on a near-daily basis to play a game I'm formulating. (I'll admit this is much simpler if you already use Gmail as your hub, as I do, then it's integrated into your Internet experience.)

Allies is the multi-player aspect of the Super Better game that Jane used day to day to recover from her injury and post-concussion syndrome; so it is not a game of solitaire ;)

Please let me know if you need an invite to Google+ by August 1st (I may not check comments at this post later).

   

The economic thriving game is unfurling in a baby step next week. [Above is Derek Sivers' video "Start Now. No Funding Needed." Derek founded CDBaby in 1997.]

If you have game suggestions, or other suggestions, please let me know in comments or over at Google+. And, please note, if you go over to check Google+ out, you are viewing the public posts. The way Google+ works is you have to be in my circle to view the super secret ones ;).

p.s. Jane McGonigal's new company, Social Chocolate, initially starts an online verson of her Super Better concept game that she used to recover from her own head injury; she's extended the game for any type of injury and/or illness (yet to be released, forthcoming). I've been thinking of what game-changing means in terms of healthcare and other fields too--but that's another story.

p.p.s. I'm well aware of the "this is a first-world problem" argument. We start where we are ourselves and branch out inclusively from there; it's not advocacy on public policy. This engages people to people. The game is meant to be something you can personally participate in.

ART CREDITS: Cy Twombly's Camino Real; iron hoop trundling was popular in the 1960s and 1970s in China; hoop trundling boys circa 1830 in New York City via Funny Emails; an American Indian hoop game via Buffalo Post.

You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life? - Rumi

"It is far more delightful to be fond of the world because it has thousands of aspects and is different everywhere. . .  for every divergence deserves to be cherished, simply because it widens the bounds of life." - Karel Capek

Are there times you're just not riveted by your desires and visions? Can't do anything to prop them up to be enjoyable to play out? There are certainly lots of reasons for that, including existential. Also it's easy to get caught up in cultural spells of what we should do, want, have, be so that the vision isn't even ours, so we can't truly align with it.

For me, I have had to keep expanding any vision that pops into my mind into ever-widening circles to be more inclusive and more encompassing of the world-at-large until it was compelling and adventurous enough to intice me. Otherwise, I'm just fine sipping lemonade on the porch.

Row row row your boat gently down the stream... merrily merrily merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

Two days ago I read Joe Vitale's blog where he said someone offered to invest in any of his encompassing ideas, “If you can put people to work, turn water into fuel, or anything else that’s considered humanitarian on a grand scale, they can make it happen.” Joe continues in his post:

My mind recalled all the wild ideas I’ve ever had. I ran one or two by my lunch partner.

“That’s not big enough,” he said.  - Joe Vitale, Lunch With God

That's how I talk myself out of my own ideas lately. "That's not big enough." And I mean talk myself out of in the best possible way as it behooves me to be devoted to an idea that's compelling.

(Guess what, I learned that words compassion and encompass have similar etymological roots.)

I'm currently car-free in a city (Las Vegas) that doesn't really make it easy in 107+ degree sunny weather to tool around. On my private blog, I'd been playing a game where I receive an imaginary check each day (the amount increases by $1000 each day) and I have to put it into play right away (no hoarding). Although, I've quit said game and approach it now from "What project do I want to do next?" assuming "money is no object."

For the first week, I used the money to do projects--perhaps a public art installation, or arrange a Hunch Hub retreat or Salon with other folks. As I've already said, I enjoy producing things much much more than consuming things. I find that if I think about paying the rent, or buying a croissant in a cafe, or getting an iPhone and much of the desires I'm advertised to suppose to have--that they fairly boring to me. But if I think broadly "bigger than me," it gets interesting again.

Day 8 into the game, muse: "I really ought to get a car." Although in my heart of hearts I'm not THAT excited about a car.

Why is that? I ask myself. Why don't I want a car? Why do I want a car? I kept on with Why questions in my head. Even that exercise barely helped... sure, I want mobility to have the freedom to go from A to B, true. That wasn't juicy enough, and I can't fake enthusiasm.

This is what I wrote down (slightly edited) in a private blog post:

Going to settle for a VW Beetle, or something practical like an FJ-Cruiser--too bored to even pretend to want them. Rather, my mind keeps being flooded with blue or silver-blue convertibles, so I'm going with it.

So while searching for VW beetle photos... found this gem!--from a car forum: "is essentially a low-cost alternative to the Porsche Boxster."

"If all goes well and the [Volkswagen] BlueSport Roadster receives the final green light for production, the first cars could arrive at VW showrooms around late 2012."

Yeah, it's def more than $8000, but more checks will be arriving. This is my deposit ;)

Still.... I couldn't muster sustaining interest in any car--not even the all-electric Tesla, although at the same time I am in a city with dismal public transit, and a severe lack of sidewalks for pedestrians, etc. And did I mention how hot the asphalt gets in triple digit weather?

I thought about it and saw what I truly want is the about freedom of movement. Car being one of thousands of ways to achieve that end. That could be Zipcar combined with good city public transit, or so many other ways And also, I want to not only flourish myself, but have freedom of movement available to All.

Not so much impose my 'vision' on everyone but add options... something for everyone--walking, biking, anti-gravity propulsion capsules, flying saucers, rockets, flying, teleporting, bilocating, Zipcars, public transit--oh i love those Japanese bullet trains! More stuff like Eurorail (Amtrack, er, so-so). Then, there's that cool guy that runs the super-cheap $30 shuttles to LA from Vegas... more shuttles, limos, flying carpets, Segways, etc.

Monorails, light rails, people-movers, cablecars, gondolas, flying porpoises, Blimps, steampunk airships, hotair balloons, kite trios, caravans of camels, Mary Poppins umbrellas, whatever floats your boat... just get me/you/us from point A to B. Car is NOT the sole way.

Why not make those train cars more aesthetic, fun, spacious, maybe interactive theater with costumes for all to wear and make-believe in the cars?

Just read this tonight [at the time of writing] at bookstore on teleportation, and walking on water. Explains my vast respect for the East:

In 1894, Baird T. Spalding was on an expedition that he wrote up in a tome, Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East. They came to a swift river and many in the expedition party wanted to pay a visit to a neighbor on the other side. The stream was about "two thousand feet wide, running bank-full, and the current was at least ten miles per hour."

"When Jast [one of the guides] rejoined the group the twelve fully dressed, walked to the bank of the stream, and with the utmost composure stepped on the water, not into it... I held my breath, expecting, of course, to see them plunge beneath and disappear.... I think each of us held his breath, until they were all past midstream, so astonished were we to see these twelve men walking calmly across the surface of the stream... and not sinking below the soles of their sandals." - Spalding

Spalding was too afraid to try this himself although Jast and Neprow insisted he could do the same and be safe.Jast instead that none of the folks that crossed over were special. "They do not have one atom more power than you were created with." Spaulding also mentioned that he had witnessed Jast materialize and dematerialize his body at will and be at two places at once.

"How is it, a few are able to do the things we have seen accomplished, that all men cannot accomplish the same things? How is it that man is content to crawl, and not only content to crawl but is obliged to do so?" - Spalding

If my guide insists that I can walk across a raging river--no bridges, other the 'bridge' to spirit--just as gracefully as he, would I? Would you? Now, that, my friends is what I want. To expand our view of what is possible, and to walk the talk.

p.s, What is this beautiful old-school convertible? Found during my car search. Lovely (via Honestly WTF).

p.p.s. This post was originally posted in my private for-my-eyes-only blog, then re-edited for Encanto circle members. The me-only blog is basically a place to sift and discern what I want to create apart from the many voices in the fray and explore project ideas before they're fully crystallized.

ART CREDITS: Amy Sol "To You From My View" via Design Milk; flying hovercraft in comic The Storm by artist Donald Lawrence via fan-tas-tic.com; magic carpet painting/illustration unknown; 2004 Detroit peoplemover photo via DetroitYes!; photo of gondola navigating narrow street in Venice by MorBCN; Dokshum iron bridge in Bhutan, a 500-year-old chain link bridge built by Thangtong Gyalpo, a 15th century monk via OneWorld.net

companions on the journey. . . of enchantment

I was re-reminded of my purpose (for want of a better term) while reading this via Time magazine about J.K. Rowling's new online venture, Pottermore:

"When Rowling does what she does best, it's the closest thing to magic available in our mundane, Mugglish world. And I say that as both a Harry Potter fan and the father of a Harry Potter fan." - "Is Pottermore Good for Harry?", TIME, June 23, 2011

Sadly the reporter admits they don't perceive miracle and magic abounding. But hey I've been there too.

Even as recently as a few months ago, the world seemed confining, and confounding. Now, suspending belief and lies, a boundless radiance is present.

BTW, that purpose I'd nearly forgotten... it's called ENCHANTMENT.

Let me back up a bit, okay way back.

When I was starting a freelance consulting business in 1995, I went it alone for a year (this was before the virtual watercooler now known as Twitter existed). It's not that I absolutely needed peers, but there was an undeniable desire to have playmates to chat and bounce ideas with that might understand what I was navigating too.

Most of my buddies had jobs, and couldn't relate (nor care) to the uncertainty and other rewards and challenges of free agents. Also, I was starting an online magazine at the time (long gone now, it was called AwesomeWomen.net) and hired a part-time researcher/writer to help me with that side-gig too. To make a long story short, that's how I became actively engaged with the local Women's Business Center and National Association for Women Business Owners (NAWBO).

For many years, those were my peers--we had diverse businesses, yet fundamentally a common journey that isn't necessarily a mainstream journey forged deep bonds between us.

Another time I created a peer network rather than seeking a ready-made group. About two to three months after surviving one of the largest natural disasters of the last century-- Indian Ocean tsunami, I roped my housemates at the time into co-creating a weekly group that met at our home on Sunday evenings called Daring to Live an Authentic Life. Among the messages (many others as well--outside scope of this post) that I grokked through that experience was one that insisted, "Don't settle." Steve Jobs summed up that message a few months after Daring to Live an Authentic Life group sprouted:

"Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." - Steve Jobs, commencment speech at Stanford University, June 14, 2005

At that time, I was yearning to have some mutual support in applying spiritual principles and simply being true to myself in a world that seemed (to my perception at that moment in personal history) not to necessarily reinforce a natural, unique direction of being.

"Living is my job and my art." - Michel De Montaigne

That hints at why fairly recently I began forging a virtual roundtable called Encanto.

It's not Hogswarts--as that'd be a bit more of the old-school-lecture do-as-I-say-model. Hogswarts however does provide, in my opinion, a way for Harry to have even more fun (and mischief) with playmates Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger than he may have had in a hermitage. My intent is to lean more towards King Arthur's Roundtable where we're surrounded with fellow peers on a common journey of self-mastery (and I'll dare say self-wizardry).

Blogs, as most websites do, tend (certainly not universal, just tendency) to invite skimming more than diving. Also blogs, being public websites available at a click of a mouse to anyone that can rustle time on a computer anywhere anytime in the world, tend to invite passersby through on their way to another destination. I know loads of people alight on Crossroads Dispatches looking for an image of stardust chess, faerie truffles, a diagram of a medieval alchemical crucibles, an essay on an essayist, or an article on Google's internal product development process--and then, poof! move along on their merry way.

Alas, as much as I'd adore public blogs (as a format), they don't match my wish for depth, intimacy, delving, diving--they aren't designed as a prime vehicle for a circle, or a roundtable, of explorers delving into the magical realms of infinite existence itself.

Encanto's intention is to be a vital, lived, engaged experience rather than a passive, drive-through experience. This Friday, July 1 midnight ends the introductory pricing ($25/month) to the Encanto circle. Then an entirely new chapter in delving into the magic of life begins ($58/month unless I hear a whisper from a griffin that it ought be otherwise). The number of magicians at any one time enchanting and engaging is capped at 25 to sustain its intimate Roundtable look and feel (there may be ebb-and-flow and circulation of members).

As always, the public blog shall continue its own unique expression, and I am honored that you are part of that journey as well, whether this is a stepping-stone from a Google search or you are a long-time confidant.

ART CREDITS: Thought of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party since a roundtable need not be round;  illustration "Knights of the Round Table Summoned to the Quest by the Strange Damsel" by Edward Burne Jones (via The Textile Blog: Edward Burne-Jones 'Quest for the Holy Grail' Tapestries--they're all beautiful); a still of the Hogwarts dining hall from first movie with Harry Potter's companions on the journey--Ron and Hermione

perhaps consider what life would be like if we truly lived by what we believe moment by moment

{Below's a repost of a May 25, 2007 article I wrote that captures my zeitgeist since many folks may be new here; and I haven't touched on this much in past two years. I am in a very optimistic, visionary, yinyang encompassing Renassiance frame of mood that provokes 'social art'--&/+ the kind of art that bursts forth dynamic cultures and civilizations. Enjoy, Evelyn---}

"Perhaps consider what life would be like if we truly lived by what we believe." - Lost & Found on The Hierophant

When I first got to the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, and saw that there were no full-on grocery stores, that's when I first got a clue that the trip was going to be a tad more expensive than I'd anticipated.

That old flashback anxiety came up the first day or two when I went out to eat, paid the bill and then flash forwarded into the future calculating in my head the total spreadsheet amount for food expenditures  for the two months (plus in actuality).

It didn't take me very long to get into the New Orleans' laidback vibe, however, and feel that somehow everything was going to be alright.

What I ended up recalling (my life flowed with grace and miracles in Thailand and Sri Lanka the winter of 2005 too) was when I take the initial, if faltering, step, the Universe takes at least 99 on my behalf.

Small example. I rarely needed to take cab rides while in New Orleans. I would simply decide where I wanted to go  - be it in Tulane or Magazine Street or the Mapleleaf Bar - and voila! someone would inevitably offer me a ride - typically without me asking.

The first time, I'd only been in town for two days so I took a cab to the Jung society meeting on the Enuma Elish myth in uptown. There I met Dan and Diane - literally right next door neighbors to where I was staying - voila! a ride home materialized.

I had no idea when I got there how I'd get home (it was a church tucked off the beaten path; a cab would definitely need to be called out.) Yet I did know I needed to be at that particular meeting. That was the step. When you listen and hear, "Go." You don't balk, "But that's all the way in uptown. It'll cost $25 roundtrip. And...."

Don't give up even before you start. You move in the direction you're being pulled despite appearances that you ought to wait until all the ducks are in the row, and you've lined a ride home, and the stock market is, and the...

I don't wait for evidence to present itself that I'm on the right path. Evidence comes, if it does at all, in hindsight. You move because the wind blows you that way.

"The only thing that will move you (and I don't mean to be too poetic about this) is the same thing that moves a leaf hanging from a tree. It's simply because the breeze blows that way. So you always know what to do: The breeze blows that way, and that's the way you go. You don't ask questions anymore. You don't evaluate why the breeze is blowing that way because you know that you don't know why. And you know you can't know why. There's never been a leaf anywhere that knows why the wind blows that way on that day at that moment. That breeze changes the orientation of your life, moment to moment to moment, simply because that's the way life's moving. And when you're living in your awakened self you have no argument with the way it's moving because it is the same as you are." - Adyashanti

Actually, that's the way I met my friend Wyatt. I didn't know how I was going to get home that day I met him busking on University Avenue either. That was our opening exhange. He asked for money. I walked over, lowered my voice and explained that I'd give him something but I didn't have enough for bus fare home myself. (Tended to go through these feast and famine cycles in the past.) I only know that something was compelling me to go to Palo Alto that day. I followed that whim. Of course, I ended up getting a ride home from my friend that works at IDEO... yet I didn't know that apriori.

I found that New Orleanians were generous, sharing and less of a "me, mine, and my" frame of mind than I'm used to observing in the US.

It's there it all dawned on me that money would end up becoming extraneous.

Call me quixotic, idealistic, dreamer. (I cannot explain the how's) I've seen into the future. (Though yes, the future keeps shifting because we change it.) Surprising myself, I feel moved toward "collective" (for lack of better name) and cooperative ways of sharing which don't necessarily involve money, or monetary systems.

I want to play in that realm. Live by that belief that we can take care of each other.

To me, art isn't to be merely visited, watched...it's more like a space you inhabit, you absorb, you be. Doubt I've said this, but I'm into social art. Not social as in we're going to exchange comments, trackbacks, and I'll add you to my buddy list.

Social as in art that creates civilizations...like this...

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

- John Lennon, Imagine

I witnessed so many acts of collectiveness in Nola, ah, where to begin. Okay, here's one I witnessed: One evening I run into a cool pianist I've met at Mimi's upstairs. He is giving away a newly inherited piano to a fellow pianist sitting there at the counter. They'd met the week earlier at Mimi's. It's an extra piano, and she doesn't own one.

That logic doesn't resonate with everyone. Why not put the piano on Craigslist? Why not eBay? Why not donate it to the ___. Because he met whom it was intended for.

Last week Donna wrote in comments: "For some real fun, try giving money away, and watch how fast it comes back to you. ;^)" Yes. (The Diamond Cutter is a marvelous true story of this in practice. If it matters, he ended up a multimillionaire in the process.) Obviously one doesn't give with any expectation of getting. I don't give for quid pro quo or karmic brownie points.

Anyhow, once I got the lesson of giving, I found another lesson was waiting.

& it has to do with truly living by what I believe. As runners are wont to say, though, your mileage may vary.

There are those who give little of the much which they have - and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.

And there are those who have little and give it all.

These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.

There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.

And there are those who give with pain, and that pain is their baptism.

And there are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor do they seek joy, nor give with mindfulness of virtue;

They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space.

Though the hands of such as these God speaks, and from behind their eyes He smiles upon the earth.

It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding;

And to the open-handed the search for one who shall receive is joy greater than giving

And is there aught you would withhold?

All you have shall some day be given;

Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors'.

You often say, 'I would give, but only to the deserving.'

The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.

They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.

Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights is worthy of all else from you.

And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.

And what desert greater shall there be than that which lies in the courage and the confidence, nay the charity, of receiving?

And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their worth naked and their pride unabashed?

See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving.

For in truth it is life that gives unto life - while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.

And you receivers - and you are all receivers - assume no weight of gratitude, lest you lay a yoke upon yourself and upon him who gives.

Rather rise together with the giver on his gifts as on wings;

For to be overmindful of your debt, is to doubt his generosity who has the free-hearted earth for mother, and God for father.        

- Kahlil Gibran

UPDATE: As soon as I hit publish, I get this about circles of sharing and generosity entrepreneurs in my inbox:

"Imagine walking down the street and a woman comes up to you and says, 'Hello. I have an offering for you.' Puzzled, you look up and in your palm falls a $7500 check. 'Why me?' 'Serendipity,' she says. 'What should I do with it?' 'Whatever you want.' 'How did you decide on $7500?' 'We sat in a circle of silence, wrote down a number on a piece of paper and it averaged out to $7500.' And then she walks away. Now that's a pretty ridiculous story, but that's what has brought us together here." - "A Radical Experiment in Generosity Launches," CharityFocus.com

art credits Visit (detail of entire painting above) by Mari Klarwein; Breath of Gaia, by Josephine Wall (btw, discovered via a cool art blog by Melissa Ulto you may enjoy, Multo.com::Visual Magic); Tree of Fruitfulness, by Lieve Prins; can't find origin (from Myspace page while surfing) but probably one of those fantasy games

Edmund Hilary was an ordinary beekeeper in Auckland, New Zealand, and other folks that didn't know how.

"In that wonderful story [Parsifal, Galahad and the Holy Grail myths], when any knight sees the trail of another, thinks he's getting there, and starts to follow the other's track, he goes astray entirely." - Joseph Campbell

I recently watched this video #1 that was sent to me via Sonia Ricotti's newsletter. It's worth watching (9 minutes).

Mind you, I already know the story of Edison, and the Wright Brothers, and the ascent of Everest pretty well. What I found intriguing was how Bob Proctor pointed out the fact that when they were in the midst of it, what they were attempting was not known. In fact, the refrain Bob repeated, "They didn't know how."

In the short six-minute video, Bob Proctor shows a slide of Edmund Hillary and Tenzay Norgay, the first documented (never know if some pilgrim didn't get there first but made no fuss) ascent of Mt. Everest.

"When they started they did not know how. They did not know how to get to the top of the mountain."

"Keep in mind that Edmund Hilary was an ordinary beekeeper in Auckland, New Zealand. Where did he ever get the idea he could go to the top of Everest?"

"It was believed that anyone that tried to get to the top would die." (And there are folks encased in ice up there.) Bob shares that he watched a TV interview with a Canadian woman that had just come down Everest, and was asked by reporters: "How does it feel now that you conquered the mountain?"

The woman climber's response: "We didn't conquer the mountain. That mountain can't be conquered. We conquered the limitations within ourselves."

Bob goes on to have us imagine Thomas Edison attempting to tell some of his friends, his wife or even his relatives about his "experiments.

"They would have thought he was right out of his mind."

Edison did not know how, he just knew he was going to do it. In another slide, Bob Proctor shares this tidbit:

"Thomas Edison's teachers told him he was "too stupid to learn anything." He was fired from his first two jobs for being "non-productive." As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times." Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.""

And, consider this, the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics.

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin, The Royal Society of London, June 1985

I agree with Bob, that most people are locked into the idea of HOW (and then don't budge). When, to me, what matters is WHAT? or WHY? In the video, he asks to inquire: "WHAT DO I REALLY WANT? Just make a decision on what it is you want."

"The way to maintain one's connetion to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want." - Clarissa Pinkola Estes in the Intuition chapter, Women Who Run With Wolves

"You won't know how until after you do it," Bob continues.

So what does that mean you don't know how? It means you're on the edge of Unknown, hurtling toward another eternal horizon, and there aren't going to be a lot of folks that grok why you do what you do. After all, you are not them, and vice versa. You're on your path, unfolding your myth. No one else knows how for you.

Whatever skills and strategies acquired through status quo thinking and cultural conditioning fail to work in the domain of the soul's journey. Yet--something--something natural and spontaneous will take the place of automatically reacting to others out of habit.

If you do know how, it's probably too cozy for your soul to stretch to its own boundarylessness. So I agree with Joseph Campbell, "If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's." As well as with Almine, "Let not the confusion that briefly figures in and out of your minds disconcert you. It is the releasing of the old; the releasing of the patterns and spiderwebs of existence."

In the midst of it all, it can feel lonely, or frustrating if you are seeking external kudos or support (it's not necessary if you can see yourself supported by and as Infinity and self-reference your Inner Ally). But like I said, just in case, consider me an ally, too.

p.s. Although Proctor made it clear that Edison mostly likely would have been underestimated by his relatives or friends, there are always other trailbrazers around to befriend. I'd have to research the precise dates of their friendship in regards to their respective inventions, yet Edison was close allies and peers with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone in a mutually beneficial kinship.

Photo Credits: American Academy of Achievement photo of Hillary and Norgay at Everest base camp after their historic ascent; speaking of trailblazing: image of airship designed by architect Vincent Callebaut. "Hydrogenase, is a zero-emissions, biofuel-powered airship that specifically employs organic algae for power... The algae farm supplying the ship’s fuel is an organic purifying station that receives carbon dioxide delivered via ships. The CO2 is then processed by the seaweed," via Earth Techling.

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance. - Epicurus

"Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance." - Epicurus

Interesting article in the LA Times today on how today's Web 2.0 millionaire entrepreneurs pour their wealth into start-ups and non-profits, rather than consumption.

This is a good a time as any to delve at least through the surface of what I see as a potential Renaissance birthing (potential, as in it's a matter of desire--not imposed).

This deserves more consideration, but here's a start.

WHAT WE BUILD, rather than WHAT WE BUY

"This is not a community that values good looks, visible wealth or having a hot body. Those are not the ways that they distinguish high status from low status," [Alice] Marwick said. "Technology millionaires don't hobnob with celebrities or buy a fancy car. They travel to Thailand or they fund an incubator. These things are just as expensive, but that's the classic hacker ethos that prizes the mind, not materials."

. . . Silicon Valley measures achievement by what entrepreneurs build, not what they buy." - "Silicon Valley status symbols emphasize mind over material", LA Times, by Jessica Guynn, June 18, 2011

Before I spotted the LA Times piece, I sent this (excerpted) to the Encanto fellow wayfarers and members:

"I've been playing a game where each day I pretend I am given a written check of a different denomination--for instance, day 1 I receive a $1000 check. Day 2 I receive a $2000 check, and so on---thus day 20 would be $20,000 and day 52 would be $52,000. It is a tougher game to play than I had imagined.

Most days (I'm only on day 10) I use the money to do some sort of public art installation, publish a journal (with artwork from a collaborator I have in mind), or arrange a retreat, conference or Salon with other folks, or otherwise spend it on things that aren't for me, alone. This is partly due to the fact that I'm a minimalist, and partly because I enjoy producing things much much more than consuming things.

I've made a lot of money in my yuppie past, and found that stuff just never did it for me; back then I was into experiences--that meant marathan-running or eating out at new restaurants or traveling to exotic countries or having front-row seats to the Pioneer Theatre. (Fine, marathon-running is NOT a spectator sport but generally much of what I did for pastimes was to pass time.)

Nowadays experiences don't appeal to me that are sit-down, sightsee, spectator-based either; I prefer to produce, participate, play. I'll be in the parade banging the tambourine along with the others, not watch from the sidelines." - Evelyn Rodriguez

In the LA Times story, Alice Murdock asserts that hacker culture is a masculine culture. I like my culture hackeresque... that's indie, that's self-organizing decentralized bubbling up grassroots rather than hierachical top-down gate-keepered, that's freedom of expression, an expressed culture (yeah, we were that idealistic in 1997)-------------------->

Actually, hacker ethos is a pretty whole-brained, holistic thing. It's sort of Whole Earth catalogy, even.

Recently, venture capitalist Fred Wilson--and, note he's based in New York City--mused about the next 'Net thing (in other words, Web 1.0 was about investing in building block infrastructure, Web 2.0 is about applications) and bouncing off Carlotta Perez' work he forecasts a coming cultural revolution. I would like to agree with him. (What I mean by that is I doubt it's a sure thing unless we want it to be so.)

All I know is, count me in for a cultural Renaissance (adore that word a bit more than revolution).

One reason I left Silicon Valley is I didn't feel an epicurean sensitivity to simple refinement and beauty I desired. I suppose the pendulum swung wee too far yang ever since they decimated the plum orchards for those semiconductor labs.

Looking back, I believe an awakened sublime and sensuous cultivation for the yin was nurtured by savoring Italy three times in a single year (while consulting to Telecom Italia's Internet portal division, Virgilio, and to the ISP division).  I pitched them social networking (using Ryze and Friendster as examples--there were no others yet), and they pitched me conviviality (including face-to-face old-fashioned rapport and authentic networking).

I've never been the same since Italy.

I enjoyed picking ripe tomatoes out in the family I was staying with's garden (outside Turin with Monte Bianco a stone's throw away), drinking handmade vino from their own vineyard, sharing a potluck al fresco feast with friends, and returning to my dreamtime in their mulberry treehouse. Bested any five-star experience I've ever had.

Italian imagination and midsummer night festivity influenced the first Salon I hosted August 2006 to mix and mingle media, food, techie, and arts folks.

Then, after a while all fancy restaurants had this sense of "been there, done that," (plus the sense of doing for me rather than with me). At least for me, I'd come to the point where I wasn't nurtured by consumption. (You may think yin is passive, but it's also the creative numinous, the fertile imagination painting visions in the aether--otherwise known as ideas, etc.) There was something more engaging and enthralling to participating with than being pampered to.

I concur with Andrea:

"One of my favourite movie scenes has always been the alfresco birthday dinner party that Juliette Binoche’s character throws Armande (Judi Dench) in the fairytale-like film, Chocolat. The casual backyard setting, in a quaint French village, features a rough-around-the-edges wire framed canopy, folding wood chairs and a long, linen-covered harvest table. Completely proletariat but utterly timeless and stylish in a way that the French pull off better than anyone. This kind of comfortable and chic setting inspires easy conversation, drinking copious amounts of red wine and gathering with friends well past sunset  — and ends with empty bottles, burned-down candles, live music and dancing into the wee hours. My kind of dinner party!" - Andrea Mills, Canadian House and Home

THE WILL TO DO IT

Nowadays, perhaps because I've lived in five cities since I left San Jose, CA in 2008, I am more inspired by an encompassing, planetary vision of Renaissance, rather pinning it to a specific place be it New York City or London or name-your-tangible-patch-of-land.

Renaissance... it's little like the etherealness of the Internet (which isn't tied to geography) and the etherealness of Shambhala, "a borderless kingdom of meditation practitioners committed to realizing enlightenment and social harmony through daily life." And mostly like the way James Carse describes the attitude of horizons (see Bonus below).

The other day I was thinking how much I enjoyed the Foothill Writers Conference when I participated in 2006, and how much my writing flourished from my attendance there that summer, and checked online to see if I could make it an excuse for visiting the Valley this summer. Lo, and behold, I find that it was cancelled in 2010 due to lack of sponsorship, and that may be its fate this year too. In Los Altos, where the Foothill College, the hosts of the writing workshop, is located: "According to a 2007 estimate, the median household income was $158,745, and the median income for a family was $185,848." Having been there, it's true that the Valley peninsula is a prosperous place (by banking standards) so much so that the lame economy excuse doesn't really explain why arts are left to languish.

"our kids attend schools where art is required every day. as it should be" -- Fred Wilson in the comments to his own post, "To Science and Art"

When John F. Kennedy asked Dr. Wernher von Braun what would it take to build and send a rocket ship to the moon, he replied, "The will to do it."

Last night, I was reading Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, edited by Diane K. Osbon, and this popped vivid. Oh, so relevant:

"From what I have seen in the history of the arts in New York, when money is poured on something it flowers. With money there has to be a flow. I had a beautiful experience of a man with money when I was a trustee of the Bollinger Foundation, which was founded by Paul Mellon, an enormously wealthy man. He and his wife had been in analysis with Carl Jung when the war came and they had to leave Switzerland. They asked Jung what they could give him in the way of a gift to express their gratitude for what he had done. He suggested they establish a foundation for the interpretation and study of symbols. That's whay they did, and it is an example of a lot of money being put to the right use. The influence of that Bollinger Series on on the literature and science of America has been enormous.

. . . When you put the money in the wrong place, it can be devastating. Where is the money [and its activating of priorities by what it attends to] going and where is it coming from in the economy of a nation, the economy of a city? You can turn a flowering culture into a desiccating culture just by wrong channeling. What factor in your own consciousness are you going to favor in the spending of the money? For instance, I have a seventy-five-dollar book coming out. Some people will say that is expensive, but those same people will spend one-hundred-and-fifty dollars to have dinner in a restaurant with another couple. So, is the money going up here in your mind or is it going down there in your stomach?" - Joseph Campbell (recommend the longer excerpt of Campbell's money musings in, "Money is a Congealed Energy and Releasing it Releases Life Possibilities")

 YIN YANG OF CREATIVE CULTURE AND INNOVATION

"Science and art are seen as two very distinct endeavors and I suppose they are. But I see science and art as the yin yang of creative culture and innovation." - Fred Wilson, "To Science and Art"

This is not meant to be a treastise on art, nor a plea for art. Rather liken it to seeding the inquiry that maybe art is different. Different from technology (and I'm a computer engineering grad, so I'm not making that up), as different as day is from night or female from male or inside from outside. Different. Not implying better or worse. Not hierarchy; rather, harmony. Complementary contraries. Technology often strives for functionality. Not so art: its purpose is, well, different (almost pointless in that it can often precipitate in a primordial pre-thought). Since it's fresh, and resonant, for me, quoting Campbell from last night's book again:

"What I understand art to be, then, is the revealing power of maya: the production in music, in dance, in the visual arts, and in literature of such "divinely superfluous beauty," of objects for esthetic arrest which are of no practical use, but which open up dimensions within. And the projecting power of maya, on the other hand, I take to be desire and loathing, which link you in phenomenal discourse to the object as object. It is as clear and clean as that." - Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living, edited by Diane K. Osbon

I don't exactly advocate swinging the pendulum from yang to yin, from active to receptive, from external to internal. The equinimity of equilibrium might be nice for a change (who knows, I've never seen it fully yet).

In Sufi master and author Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee's essay, Invoking the World Soul, quoted below (I've enjoyed hearing him speak several times when I lived in the Bay Area), he is sharing Platonic ideals (and overall newfound appreciation for philosophies and arts of antiquity--Greek and Egyptian that the printing press made easier to share) embraced by  many Renaissance philosophers and artists that diversified and expanded some of the pendulum extremes of the prior Ages and of the times (i.e. the Inquisition was still pretty robust, ask Pico della Mirandola):

"So one can go back, for example, to Plato who understood the cosmos is a single living creature, which contains all living creatures within it.  So from the very origins of our Western civilization there is this deep understanding that the Earth is a living spiritual being.

. . . .In the Renaissance, the world soul animated and formed nature according to divine proportions.  And once again the garden of the world was enchanted with magical power and transcendent meaning — implicit in every part of nature. This was this wonderful relationship in the Renaissance between the imagination and the creative principle in life.  And there was this extraordinary flowering that really came from the divine feminine within the imagination, within life, and it was celebrated.  Once again the garden of the soul was here in this world.  It wasn’t just after you died in heaven, in paradise; it was here in the art that the Renaissance masters created.  And this is why, for some of us, the Renaissance touches the soul now so deeply and why there has been a revival of understanding of what happened in the Renaissance. " - Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Invoking the World Soul

This is corroborated in several Wikipedia entries (my better resources are in storage) of the greatest influencers of Renaissance look and feel, for instance:

Marsilio Ficino "espousing the Neoplatonist view of the world's ensoulment and its integration with the human soul. "[...] There will be some men or other, superstitious and blind, who see life plain in even the lowest animals and the meanest plants, but do not see life in the heavens or the world [...] Now if those little men grant life to the smallest particles of the world, what folly! what envy! neither to know that the Whole, in which 'we live and move and have our being,' is itself alive nor to wish this to be so."" - Wikipedia

I'm coming full circle to the title of the collection of Joseph Campbell writings I am reading, I mean the title itself is worthy of reflection:

Reflections on the ART OF LIVING.

And, considering the kind of culture we are creating is the one we are devoting ourselves to day by day minute by minute, not the culture 'they' are creating as they includes us (remember, we're hackers).

And, I come back to Italian ethos too again,

"I thought -- and now I know -- that Italians claim more time for their lives." - Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

p.s. This post was setting a bit of context-setting, however, I'd prefer future ones on new Renaissance to be more off-the-cuff, spontaneous and daring in a improvisational sense so it leans more towards the future than past history (while planted in present, and presence too). If there are any excerpts or article links--they'll be in the footnotes, at the end.

BONUS: Sramana Mitra wrote a great 3-part article on her compelling vision for a Silicon Valley Renaissance, that also values arts and culture. I added my two cents in the comments in part three.

BONUS 2: Really worth reading James Carse on his refreshing view of the Renaissance and metaphorically referring to cultures as horizons: "There is nothing in the horizon itself, however, that limits vision, for the horizon opens onto all that lies beyond itself." An aside, Flickr founding team was very influenced by Infinite and Finite Games, too. Kevin Kelly, in What Technology Wants, praised it for "alter[ing] my thinking about life, the universe, and everything."

Here's wee tidbit (my favorite longer excerpts of "Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility" here):

"Who lives horizontally is never somewhere, but always in passage. [Note to ourself: Thus,  the crossroads...always a new crossroad. Always liminal, infinitely unfolding at the edge...]

Since culture is horizontal it is not constrained by time or space.

To the degree that the Renaissance was a true culture it has not ended. Anyone may enter into its mode of renewing vision. This does not mean that we repeat what was done. To enter a culture is not to do what others do, but to do whatever one does with the others." - James Carse

ART CREDITS: "Once given the marvelous new capabilities..." quote box via 1997 essay (it does still rock conceptually), Create or Be Created: How the Internet Cultural Renaissance is Turning Audience Members into Artists, by William Butler O'Conner; Photo still from one of my favorite movies, Chocolat, via Heirloom Philosophy; photo from backyard birthday party created by Jeremy for Ashley (they're the photography duo, we are the parsons) via 100 Layer Cake; exuberant public art (and very metaphoric!) via Honestly WTF: "Not only was it balls to the wall amazing, it was 110% real! And honestly, who doesn’t love bouncy balls? Danish photographer Peter Funch was there to capture the impressive spectacle and thanks to my new favorite online art store, Lumas, the limited edition prints are available for sale."; btw, my $2000 bcheck went to secure a Solar Blossom, "a pop up art gallery that is powered by solar and is inspired by the Bluebonnet flower" via Treehugger.

The more experiments the better. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

After watching this video "The Dare of DIY" by Tara Gentile, on how the handmade, DIY, artsy, "why not?" culture is akin to entrepreurship and tying the two into a tapestry, I'm adding Tara Gentile into the ally category, too.

Tara shares that a common thread among the handmade, DIY, indie set is the burning question:

Can it be done?

The business of sharing your stuff out in the wide world can also be looked at in the same adventurous spirit of the creative act. Tara, quoting landscape designer Steve Gerischer from the book, Made by Hand, shares, "Look at it as an opportunity to try stuff out, "Ask yourself, "What do I get to do?" not "What do I have to do?""

 

Watch live streaming video from etsy at livestream.com

And loving this sentiment, from same book, Made by Hand by Mark Fraenfelder (a few sample chapters in PDF here): "I am at my most creative when I do something I have no experience with." says Andrew Anker, SAY Media (SAY Media is behind Typepad, where this blog is hosted, btw).

Another gem from Tara's video presentation at the Etsy Labs gathering: "You have no preconceived notions about how something is going to turn out, you have no specific expectations, you have no instructions, you have no role models,--you just kind of give it a go. That's really the crux of experimenting."

BONUS: This post is eye-opening belief-busting one to ponder: "Can You 'Get Right' by $100."

ART CREDITS: "Home Sewing is Easy" is a detail of a printed, novelty cotton fabric--tres cute----via Sew Tessuti.

....you start out into the dark. Then, strange little help-mates come along - Joseph Campbell

“I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances." - Brian Tracy

Platitudes are so easy to bandy about: Take more chances! Be bolder! Do what's never been done before! Exclamation points galore.

Can be a wee bit harder to act on, be, and embody.

If I were trying to, let's say, start a dry-cleaning business I believe I'd have many more allies. Yet try to do something you're not too sure anyone's done before (and definitely not that crystal-clear and known to yourself, either), and as far as I've seen allies are far and few between. Truth be told, I get more flak than support. So I tend to keep mum. Yet I'm not sure staying tight-lipped and isolated is the best remedy for creative folks, either.

So let's consider each other allies for a moment.

And you can consider this blog to be your friend. You'll have to participate to get the full benefit of alliance. (I'm not a mind-reader. So by participate, we can begin by use of your blog with links here to add your two cents--I'll find the clews, use the comments below, or subscribe to Encanto... I see Skype group calls in the future. Private email doesn't benefit others in our circle; so that's last resort.)

So here we begin... First, it can't hurt to devour some more Campbell, because Campbell is an ally too.

"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's." - Joseph Campbell

I owe a huge thank you to a few screenwriting books for re-reminding me of Campbell--although I'll be upfront and say that most script-writing tomes don't address the power of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey in terms our own journey. (I have two characters in a 'story' I'm writing in the film biz, so it's been  part of my research). Wildly enough, screenwriting books keep dropping in my lap--for instance, a publicist just sent along "Riding the Alligator: Strategies for a career in screenplay writing" (still reading, so neutral so far). All these screenwriting how-to's praise Campbell--a lot.

So when I stumbled into the philosophy section of the bookstore a week or so ago, I decided to skim An Open Life, an edited conversation based on a series of interviews conducted between 1975 and 1985 with Joseph Campbell and Michael Toms as I wanted to get back to the source, rather than reading 2nd and 3rd-hand interpretations (it's been six years since I read Campbell).

The beauty of the book, An Open Life, is it is written decades after his ground-breaking The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and so he's had the benefit of time to reflect and re-consider what he's researched and shared.

After an evening of reading a few other books on myth and mystery at the bookstore, as I headed with my mother back towards her car in the parking lot, and the vanity license plate, GUIDED winked from the first stall. (Really, I don't make this stuff up.)

I think that's the crux of what Campbell is trying to say about following the clues in this passage, and that once you do heed the Herald you'll feel GUIDED one step at a time into the Unknown:

Campbell: [Answering interviewer's question on the Eastern guru-disciple model, Campbell says that it's not necessarily culturally appropriate in the West and gives a Holy Grail example, paraphrasing from La Queste del Saint Graal.] "They were seated at King Arthur's roundtable when The Grail appeared "carried by angelic miracle, covered, however by a cloth. Everyone was in rapture and then it withdrew. Arthur's nephew Gawain stood up and said, "I propose a vow. I propose that we should all go in pursuit of this Grail to behold it unveiled."
. . .
"They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest that he had chosen where there was no path and where it was darkest." Now, if there's a way or path, it's someone else's way; and the guru has a path for you. He knows where you are on it. He knows where he is on it, namely, way ahead. And all you can do is get to be as great as he is. This is a continuation of the dependency of childhood; maturity consists in outgrowing that and becoming your own authority for your life. And this quest for the unknown seems so romantic to Oriental people. What is unknown is the fulfillment of your own unique life, the likes of which has never existed on the earth. And you are the only one who can do it. People can give you clues how to fall down and how to stand up; but when to fall and when to stand, and when you are falling and when you are standing up, this only you can know."

Interviewer Michael Toms paraphrases elements of the Hero and the Call, and mentions there's a chapter in Hero with a Thousand Faces entitled "Refusal of the Call", "you talk about how we often follow society, and with the Call the reverse is what's more appropriate."

Campbell [Wee snippet, much longer reply including that it is certainly possible to live a noble life "in the village compound", as well, if no Call comes]. On the other hand, if the Call is whispering: "But if a person has had the sense of the Call--the feeling that there's an adventure for him--and if he doesn't follow that, but remains in the society because it's safe and secure, then life dries up.... If you have the guts to follow the risk, however, life opens, opens, opens up all along the line...  And just like in Dickens' novel, little accidental meetings and so forth turn out to be main features in the plot, so in your life. And what seems to have been mistakes at the time, turn out to be directive crises. And then he asks: "Who wrote this novel?".... The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way."

Interviewer, Michael Toms: "Joseph, in that same chapter on the Call, you wrote: "The myths and folk tales of the whole world make clear that the refusal [of the Call] is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest." And then you go on to talk about how we get fixed in our own security and our own ideals and are reluctant to see them change."

Campbell: "There's a kind of regular morphology and inevitable sequence of experiences if you start out to follow your adventure. I don't care whether it's in economics, in art, or just in play. There's the sense of the potential that opens out before you. And you have no idea how to achieve it; you start out into the dark. Then, strange little help-mates come along, frequently represented by little fairy spirits or the little gnomes, who just give you clues, and these open out. Then there is the sense of danger you always run into--really deep peril--because no one has gone this way before. And the winds blow, and you're in a forest of darkness very often and terror strikes you."

Interviewer: "So often we see those dark places as huge problems rather than as opportunities. What does mythology have to say about that?"

Campbell: "Well, mythology tells us that where you stumble, there your treasure is.... where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater powers in ourselves.

Toynbee speaks of challenge and response, and every culture and individual runs into these challenges. If the power to respond fails, then that's the end. But where the power to respond succeeds, there comes a new amplification of life and consciousness.

When I wrote about the Call forty years ago [published 1949], I was writing out of what I had read. Now that I've lived it, I know it's correct. And that's how it turned out. I mean, it's valid. These mythic clues work."

[Later interviewer Toms asks about the irrationality of following this sort of Call:] Campbell: "This is irrational. That's the point. All compassion, all sympathy, is irrational. Love is irrational. The rational is always stressing I--thou opposites. The mind is in the world of separateness and angular structures. It's a world put together in a way to be calculated. Compassion, love--these jump mathematics."

p.s. The cited chapter "The Refusal of the Call" starts off using King Minos, who built the labyrinth in an attempt to contain his shadow--here the Ego refusing to surrender, as an example of refusing the call, which was projected as a monster, the Minotaur. It's an example of Carl Jung's statement, "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate." Your demons, and monsters, refusals and aversions, become writ large, projected on-screen 'out there':

"The divinity itself became his terror; for, obviously, if one is oneself one's god, then God himself, the will of God, the power that would destroy one's egocentric system, becomes a monster." - Campbell

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears / I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Another writer on a philosophy Wiki aptly interpreted this chapter further, and shares: "An unanswered call makes the would-be hero a victim now needing to be saved by a hero. This is an interesting psychological point made by Campbell. Our need to be saved and desire and victimization are actually the result of our own failure to answer the calls presented to us, a failure to recognize the Herald in our midst. But we express this as victimization, or the need to be saved. What a tangled web we weave when we refuse the call. [My note: could explain over-emphasis on Messianic/Savior and Superhero plotlines, rather than on self-mastery.] King Minos is given as an example: whatever house he builds will be a house of death, always creating new problems to be solved by a hero."

ART CREDITS: Parsifal, by Willy Pogany ~1912 via The Art of Narrative; 1895 painting by Edwin Austin Abbey shows the Arthurian knight Sir Galahad via National Geographic; Theseus by Edward Burne Jones of the hero, Theseus, following Adriane's clews (the unfurling thread of inspiration in form of little clues and cues) to root out the Minotaur, and find his way back via the very beguiling website on Hellenic literature-from article "Theseus and the Minotaur are One."

when an archer is shooting for fun he has all his skill - chuang tzu

When an archer is shooting for fun 

He has all his skill – Chuang Tzu

I enjoy checking in on Kickstarter creative projects to (a) support other artists and (b) for inspiration.

At Karakasa Games' website, there's a video where indie game developer Wiley Wiggins mentions how the current game industry caters (for profit's sake) to the lowest common denominator with the result being "a lot of beautiful games--a huge spectacle--but are kind of soulless."

I've spent effort to dilute the spark of my ideas to appeal to executives' conceptions of what is blockbuster!! mass! appeal! No more! So I'm very encouraged by these indie trends. Congrats to Wiley and his team for raising $24, 221 for their game.

Anyway, you may also enjoy scouring Kickstarter projects for allies, inspiration, and fun yourselves.

p.s. I also adore the story-telling game Do! The Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. They raised $24, 383 for their whimsical storytelling for children project (updates here):

"Premise: There are hundreds small worlds orbiting a flying temple. Like islands, these small worlds often have strange cultures and unique problems. Whenever the people have a conflict that cannot be resolved on their own, they send letters to the temple requesting assistance. The temple sends young monks on a pilgrimage across the universe responding to a stack of letters one at a time. Their goal is to leave each world with less trouble than when they arrived." - Daniel Solis

They ask backers to collaborate and write make-believe letters to the "pilgrims" (i.e. future players of the story-telling game) for an imaginative, yet simple [i.e. NO computer necessary] game. This game also appealed to me, as serendipity would have it, it has some common elements to one of my projects, too.

For me, disaster was my saving grace. - Ash Ambirge

“The only way you can tell the difference between disaster and opportunity is to decide to make an opportunity out of every event.” - John T. Unger

In last few days, I've heard several inspiring true stories of disaster and adversity overcome through surrender and grace. In no particular order...

• Bob Doyle shares his story in this 15-minute video via Sonia Ricotti's site, Unsinkable. "I felt like a complete loser.... To be someone who wants to make a difference in the world that wants to give up--talk about being knocked down." / "If you can give it up to the Universe, you're life can change." / "I'm just going to have fun with this, I'm going to follow whatever comes up [as far as intuitive nudges]."
• "My good friend (and bestselling author) Sonia Ricotti went through a NASTY phase herself. A potentially deadly blood clot shattered her health. Financial devastation stole her lifestyle and home out from under her. An important relationship ended (which, to make matters worse, involved an alcoholic)...all of it hitting her AT ONCE. Something like that could destroy most people, but Sonia knew what to do and did it in style... She bounced back on a grand scale... and rebuilt a thriving business and a beautiful life." - from an email by Joe Vitale
• "Want to hear the story of how I created my first product while homeless, crying, and living in my car, out of a K-Mart parking lot in the slums of South Philadelphia? And how I leveraged my blog to pull me out of homelessness?" - Ash Ambirge
• John Unger's third disaster was "having the roof of his studio cave in while he was standing on top of it, which nearly brought him to bankruptcy but ended up as the catalyst for the full-time art career he has now." - Chris Guillebeau interview with John Unger / Then John shares: "Part of my resilience is that I know from experience that just because it seems like the apocalypse, it doesn’t mean tomorrow isn’t coming. I figure that the world ends every second, and it starts over the very next second. I’ve seen the end of the world so many times I’m just not impressed by it anymore." / And another gem: "In fact, one of my favorite lines about how I started my art career is “I did it with nothing, because nothing is free.”"

I'm sharing these stories because I realize there a ridiculous amount of stigma and shame around job loss, business and financial "failure" (particularly in the success-frantic USA) that it's time to directly confront that failure/success see-saw duality that can get us fixated (and stuck). Failure?... whatever--it's merely an inflection point in a very very amazing process called Infinity. (btw, I adore James Carse way of looking at Life as an Infinite Game.)

My first brush with disaster was when my Dad died fairly suddenly two weeks before my high school prom. It's one thing to deal with emotionally (and I touched on that previously in Father's Day posts), but it was also a financial ruin for our family. My Mom had no income source--other than social security widow's benefits, and no marketable skills. Zero life insurance. Three kids, and I was the oldest. I managed to graduate college with zero debt and zero student loans from a private university (read: private=expensive) by working part-time (first job ever), qualifying for merit scholarships, and jumping at the right time at the right place (the state was pouring resources to any student whom wished to study computer engineering when I was second semester sophomore--so I simply switched my degree from computer science to computer engineering even though it meant losing credits and going to summer school to catch up).

I believe I dealt with that disaster and also with the post-tsunami "post-traumatic growth" opportunity fairly well (considering) because both felt like random, outside events out of my control. Surely it wasn't my fault that my Dad died when he did. It wasn't my fault that a tidal wave formed at the exact minute we were vacationing on an island shore in Thailand.

Yet, if we lose a job, or bankrupt our business venture, or get mixed up with sabotaging romantic/business partners and everything goes to hell in a handbasket, it can feel like a thoroughly personal reflection and assessment of our unworthiness (or our stupidity or insert-the-self-berating-term here) in comparison to natural disaster or an accident. Those times are when I've found it hardest to recover since I tend to focus far too long on, "Oh no, this is all my fault."

And, to be perfectly honest, when it isn't a wild natural disaster, allies are few and far between. Mostly, their refrain goes something like, "I told you so." Plus the entire universe seems to agree that it is so totally your fault and you are the duddiest dud in the entire galaxy--that is, until you stop that b.s. In other words, get over yourself--it's all part and parcel of process of your unfolding myth.

Pretty much the Ego is always vying to find some identity to affix to, and "poor me" works just as swell as "rock star me." (Neither are true.)

Anyhow, without further ado, here's another graceful way to look at "failure" that one rarely sees mention of in the risk-averse public sphere from former vice-president of Facebook; this is an excerpt from Chamath Palihapitiya's final email to his troops as he left to start his own venture fund:

"don’t ignore that which you don’t immediately understand and keep pushing to evolve faster than what people expect. it can create unease at times but its our only path to long term relevance.

speak the truth. its too easy to “manage” – upwards, sideways, downwards and be rewarded for it. this is death. speak candidly especially when it means it won’t be well received. respect the person but don’t let bad ideas go unchallenged.

their is more valor in failure than success. success is hard to define and hard to isolate root causes when it happens. its rare to learn much of anything from success except to conflate luck and skill, but you learn tons in failure. take enough risks that you continue to fail… and celebrate those so that it becomes the battle scars you talk about when you do eventually succeed." - Former VP Facebook, Chamatch Palihapitiya

p.s. PLAY as LIFE is an INFINITE GAME... Join us on Encanto monthly... more unfurling on July 1st when pricing goes up slightly (new and current subscribers by July 1st are locked into their original contribution amounts).

art credits: from seesaw glum to glee: not sure who's digital illustration this is but it's via Big Kid Walking Through the Park blog; illustration "I am nothing without you" by Niko Geyer (see also his site, Niko Geyer); oh, I've saved this seesaw photo from ?? for several years--yikes, not sure whom to credit; photograph "Woman on see saw" by photographer Ann Giordarno

$650,000 grant drops in your lap, and you'd...

I received this totally spam email. Yet it contains a good question.

They want me to put to "good use" a sum of $650,000.

Great, let's play along with that. Could I put it to good use? What would I do? (The original headline/subject line was "About the Donation.")

What would you do?

And, being my birthday (not today--that day), I thought I'd check out the random daily Abraham quote for a year-long emphasis to embody:

"What anyone else has or does not have has nothing to do with you. The only thing that affects your experience is the way you utilize the Non-Physical Energy with your thought. Your abundance or lack of it in your experience has nothing to do with what anybody else is doing or having. It has only to do with your perspective. It has only to do with your offering of thought. If you want your fortunes to shift, you have to begin telling a different story."-- Abraham excerpted from the book "Money and the Law of Attraction: Learning to Attract Health, Wealth & Happiness"

The "About the Donation" offering of $650,000 email read (deleted the phone number in the signature):

Hi,

Sorry I haven't gotten back with you, daily activities has kept me busy with work as a private  air charter service consultant.  I contacted you on the internet while looking to support a non profit charity, rescue group or a  social worker and I am proud with the good work you do and happy to know that my sponsorship money goes directly to a good use.

 I am making these donations because the economic downturn has created seemingly insurmountable challenges for nonprofits - organizations that rely on the generosity of others for their financial viability.  I know that is is a critical time for nonprofit organizations.

I am making a cash donation of Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars which I inherited from my late grandfather who was an industrialist and international businessman. My late grandfather's heart was as big as all outdoors. It was from him that I learned the greatest joy in life comes from giving, not from receiving.  I trust that you are reliable, trustworthy , compassionate in order to handle these donations for a good cause.

Let me know how you can make use of the funds.

Regards,

John Hamilton

Now my response to the correspondence, which I wrote off the top of my head without thinking and analyzing and agonizing about it too much--heck this window of opportunity may not be around forever, so I responded promptly (in the new myth blog, not to the spammed email):

Dear Mr. Hamilton,

Thank you so much for your offer. I am sorry to hear about your grandfather's passing, and my thoughts and prayers are with you and your family at this time.

I obviously am not familiar with your intentions nor your late grandfathers. But I will tell you want I have in mind.

I will locate a fiscal agent in order to filter the donation through, and it can be a tax deductible contribution for you. This is one idea for the best use of funds. As you already indicated that your grandfather loved to give, this bodes well for the idea I'm about to present to you.

We can place the $650,000 into a microloan program for culture-makers that are focused on the imprint of giving.

We can give copies of Geshe Michael Roach's book, The Diamond Cutter, to those that do not have the resources to purchase it themselves. I checked, and online, it is available at Google eBooks (may be useful as we can have a 'group' reading and see what others are highlighting) for $11.99.

In addition, there will be a "lending library" of books such as by Florence Scovel Shinn, Joseph Campbell, Lewis Hyde, Rilke, James Carse, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Alchemist, etc. available.

There will be pop-up unconferences free and open to all (funded by sponsorships) available in different U.S. cities as well.

However, the bulk of the funds are used for microloans to artists pushing the edges of innovation in areas that are difficult to secure private or public funding precisely because they do not fit a known, established medium, genre or category. Emphasis will be given to arts and creative projects that push the edges iin terms of possibilities, i.e. telling new stories. (Using the word 'story' generically--in other words, showcasing brand-new options rather than portraying or fighting the status quo.)

Loans will range from $1000 to $75,000, in general although there could be situations where more is given, especially in a peer-to-peer arrangement. For instance, for larger loans, we may tap into a network of potential private individual loaners (they may use something simple like Loanback).

To emphasize, these are no-interest microloans and are payable back to the fund in order to keep it sustainable and circulating to new artists and organizations. This is not private equity, and no one takes a stake or stock in the ventures that are given loans. Neither are these donations. Part of the intent of making these "loans" rather than donations is that the artist/collective/company is committed to making a longer-term viable venture, rather than a one-off project (ala Kickstarter), and are in need of a modest amount of startup capital.

Of course, this model is really rather flexible and not set in stone as we are in the conception phases, and would welcome your feedback as we move forward with your grant of $650,000.

Thank you so much for your generosity,

Evelyn Rodriguez

p.s. This is not copyrighted. No rights reserved--please take this idea, and spread it like wildflowers. You are welcome to implement this idea. The more the merrier. Never can have too many microloan programs for cultural innovation, and renaissances and such.

ART CREDITS: Photo "Humble Gift" by marielliott; emerging fern unfurling (a.k.a. koru symbol) by ericinsf

Creation is pleasure and torture at the same time. It’s trying to make something out of nothing. It’s a birth of some sort. - zooey deschanel

"Creation is pleasure and torture at the same time. It’s trying to make something out of nothing. It’s a birth of some sort. Sometimes it’s like pulling a piano out of a swamp. Sometimes it’s like walking on air. The torture of that nothing-space in front of you, and the pure elation of filling that space with something good—it’s one of life’s great juxtapositions. I am grateful for that—the torture and the pleasure. " - Zooey Deschanel, Southwest Air Spirit Magazine, April 2011

Make something out of nothing. She can't literally mean nothing, right? I mean you need at least a studio, or a Mac Air, or a guitar, or an illustrator wanting to be paid for that picture book collaboration. Where does all that come from? Money? You think? I used to think so.

Nope, not money. Where does money come from? Keep following down all the turtles... Nothing. (Five purple stars for any homework turned in by the participant reading this:  Don't just take it on word, check it out for yourself.) Okay, another tack...

"In 2009 a group of wealthy Germans asked their government to require them to pay higher taxes. "We have more money than we need," said the 44 multi-millionaires. They wanted to help alleviate the ravages of poverty and unemployment. I urge you to make a comparable move, Leo. In what part of your life do you have more abundance than most people? Are there practical ways you could express your gratitude for the extravagant blessings life has given you? I think you'll find that raising your levels of generosity will ultimately lead to you receiving more love." - Rob Brezsny, Leo horoscope for May 19, 2011-- nope I'm not a Leo btw, this just seemed relevant

I hadn't read The Diamond Cutter (the business book, not the Diamond Cutter sutra which I have re-read) since 2005. Recently, I found it tucked in the Buddhism section in a bookstore recently although it more appropriately belongs in the Business category. It made so much more sense to me now than it did six years ago. In fact, I was fairly stunned by author Geshe Michael Roach's description of "The Economics of Limitlessness."

 "You can just throw out the idea of sharing limited resources, and by the way you can throw out the idea of poverty itself. Wealth is a perception (and therefore a reality) forced on anyone who has been truly generous in the past. It is therefore available to all people. The mind--a mind crippled by the assumptions and, frankly, fairy tales [collective imprinting at subconscious level] of our civilization, passed down by well-meaning parents over its entire length--balks at the possibility that every living person could have more than enough wealth. It's not something that has ever happened before in our recorded history, says this state of mind, and so it could not happen now. We've heard this argument before; it wasn't true then, and it's not true now. Watch out, Columbus [and all the explorers prior], you'll fall over the edge because the world is flat. Iron could never fly in the sky, or float for that matter. It's not possible that practically every person in the world could have the same access to the world's information, running through wires made of glass or beamed down from a place beyond. Where is the absolute amount of wealth in the world? Where does new wealth really come from?" - The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life, by Michael Roach

There is just no way that I can fathom to distill this idea of limitless wealth for all into a single blog post. The crux comes down to knowing the source of wealth (i.e. the source of anything) and changing subconscious imprints (personal and collective) from separation to wholeness, from scarcity to infinity: "this particular imprint can be planted only by watching yourself giving all you can to others.... financial, yes, but also in terms of giving your own time, and your emotinal and professional support, and helping people with ideas."

Connecting the dots between these three excerpts this also means I will be giving much more of my time and ideas to this blog as time and ideas are two things I have in extravagant abundance currently.

So ask yourself: In what part of your life do you have more abundance than most people?

p.s. I'm in the mood to chat more about symbols, myth, subconscious, storytelling futures, especially experiential art, alchemy, and luxury (more in the Coco Chanel way, "Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.”), creative process, and such flux.

BONUS: And making something out of nothing is pretty much alchemy, eh? I've transcribed an excerpt here from Deepak Chopra's The Book of Secrets on the alchemy of transformation which relates to the source of wealth (Chopra calls it "one reality"), the nothing. The alchemist in the diagram appears next to a huge salt shaker, which reminds me of this passage from the excerpt that distinguishes transformation from change: "The key to true transformation is that nature doesn't move forward in step-by-step movements. It takes quantum leaps all the time, and when it does, old ingredients aren't simply recombined. Something new appears in creation for the first time, an emergent property. For example, if you examine hydrogen and oxygen, they are light, gaseous, invisible, and dry. It took a transformation for those two elements to combine and create water, and when that happened, an entirely new set of possibilities emerged with it, the most important from our point of view being life itself. The wetness of water is a perfect example of an emergent property. In a universe without water, wetness can't be derived by shuffling around properties that already exist. Shuffling only produces change; it isn't sufficient for transformation. Wetness has to emerge as something completely new in creation. Once you look closely enough, it turns out that every chemical bond produces an emergent property. (I gave the example in passing of sodium and chlorine--two poisons that when combined produce salt, another basic element of life)."