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.
M. Scott Peck: The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace Just started, but compelled by the model of moving from pseudo-community (where everyone is fake nice) to a true community where no one is trying to change anyone else; and collaboration truly flourishes.
Michael Scott: The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel Just checked out of library. Adore fantasy, fairy tales, and myth. And when the jacket said that Michael Scott was an authority on mythology and folklore, I was hooked. Plus I still have designs on writing my own mythic tale down soon.
Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation Really intrigued by the title. Fabulously diverse in examples. If you ever felt like a square in round world, this book will make you sing for joy because that's what life is about--growing, moving, evolving.... The book is much stronger for being in Science section and not restricted to business innovation alone.
"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living." - Joseph Campbell
PILGRIMAGE - the inclination toward a willingness to live in perpetual discovery taken in form of an outer, worldly path or journey towards that which is simultaneously inherently Pathess and without distance; to move in unknown mystery and allow grace to unfold; sense of 'play' invoking gamer lingo -'sandbox' - for MMORPG which are "non-linear and open-ended" (hmmm, life on earth is THE ultimate massively multiplayer role-playing game but we often stick to the linear cause-effect closed-off 1.0 version); focused on active movement and engagement and experimenting and direct experience in and with the world as meditation over sitting still in concentration in a cave in Siberia; epiphanies; following the path with heart (i.e. "Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question." - The Teachings of Don Juan, by Carlos Castenada)
We have all known grace - sometimes it shows up as: serendipity, exhilarating adventure, synchroncity, coincidence, miracles, 'magic', breath-taking moments, sweeping moments of unexplicable love and compassion, simple joy, 'flow', time stands still moments, blessed moments, instants where you are buoyed and transported by beauty or nature or simply sublime extraordinariness of the ordinary. (Above two paragraphs I wrote in a private email outlining an idea sent 4/13/2006)
The first time I walk into the used bookstore called after the blue cypress, I interrupt the clerk listening to a monologue by a customer eruditely citing Ulysses and Lolita in the same paragraph if she has any of the Memory of Fire series by Eduardo Galeano. I'd already browsed the history section to no avail. She searches her computer, stares at the cover art before saying: "I think I saw that one in the fiction section."
"Fiction?!"
"Fiction."
“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” ― Joseph Campbell
"Stop being such a cheapskate in your business dealings and your personal life. Give, give, give to others; make sure deals are win-win for both sides. Again, it's not the amount of money involved, it's maintaining--all day long--a truly generous, creative, flowing state of mind that wants to see everybody prosper. Ben Franklin was perhaps the greatest statesman, scientist, and businessperson in America's history--and his response to competition was to invite all his competitors to join a new society called a Chamber of Commerce, dedicated to finding ways to work together to expand markets, and make everybody involved richer."
Clue: From Memory of Fire: Volume 3: Century of the Wind by Eduardo Galeano a compilation of vignettes from the history of the Americas written in present tense:
The roundup is on for the wounded and hiding strikers. They are hunted like rabbits, with broadsides from a moving train, and in the stations like netted fish. One hundred and twenty are captured in Aracataca in a single night. The soldiers awaken the priest and grab the key to the cemetery. Trembling in his underwear, the priest listens to the shootings begin.
Not far away, a little boy bawls in his crib.
The years will pass and this child will reveal to the world the secrets of a region so attacked by a plague of forgetfulness that it lost the names of things. He will discover documents that tell how the workers were shot in the plaza, and how Big Mamma is the owner of lives and haciendas and of the rain that has fallen and will fall, and how between rain and rain Remedios the Beautiful goes to heaven, and in the air passes a little old plucked angel who is falling into the henhouse. (187 and 464)
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Complete quote via the Joseph Campbell Foundation: "If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
* * *
Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked." - Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, pp. 113, 120
Hearing (and living) lots of adventure stories lately. Recently regaled with Hamdi Ulukaya's story of growing up milking sheep at his family’s dairy in near the Euphrates River in Turkey. I listened to CEO Ulukaya's tale unfurl into Chobani Yogurt's entrepreneurial odyssey with all its adventurous twists at New Orleans Entrepreneur Week.
While I adore true-life epics--unless the protagonist of the tale is deceased leaving behind all their authentic private journals and letters--what happens often is so much of the nitty-gritty roller-coaster ride of life is portrayed as a flattened-out glide towards overnight success, or gussied up for its publicity effect.
Obstacles omitted, accolades exaggerated. Something gets obscured, even lost, in the veneer, and I'm not sure what's tossed out is not the pearl in the oyster.
"The plot is just a vehicle for inner transformation."
"The character reluctantly surmounts a trial or obstacle but in order to prevail he must first conquer his own flaw or inner fears," as well as often an external embodiment of those fears and resistance in the form of an antagonist.
"[In Act II,] Create highs and lows in the quest and the first hard setback."
"The most difficult obstacle yet has to be overcome and the hero must do--or die."
And, most significantly:
"The inner change of the character is put to the test."
Listening to the Hero's Journey talk while stepping back from being the star of my own life, I witnessed the stage from a spectator's distance. Rather than bemoan the obstacles in my life, these could be easily interpreted as what makes for a fascinating, unfolding mythic tale of an explorer. Then donning back the heroine's role, obstacles appear to keep individuated life in step with the dynamism of Life rather than stagnating.
I googled the active, verb form of "adventure" and received back:
ADVENTURE: "Engage in hazardous and exciting activity, esp. the exploration of unknown territory: "they had adventured into the forest". Synonyms: verb. risk - venture - hazard - jeopardize - dare - jeopard."
I googled "expedition," which is more the word that has been coming up for me for months. EXPEDITION:
A journey or voyage undertaken by a group of people with a particular purpose, esp. that of exploration, research, or war.
The people involved in such a journey or voyage.
Guess what? The synonym for "expedition" is "dispatch." And the name of this blog is Crossroads Dispatches!
Embarking on an expeditionary series hosted here over the next month (or so), and everyone's invited. We'll call the spontaneous scribing, "Everyday Adventure." Expect (as in expectancy more so than expectation) enchantment, experimentation, experiential engagement, and perhaps excruciating epiphanies (alas, perception doesn't always come cheap) to abound. Echoing Marcel Proust's aphorism, we won't be seeking out new adventures as much as welcoming the one we're already on with fresh eyes. This might emcompass a turnabout and facing and embracing obstacles as they come as part of the spice of the story we're inhabiting, for instance. It's playing improv with life (in improv the key words are: "yes, and....") to keep the story rolling.
All I'll intend to be doing is breathing, living, morphing, shaping, and sharing stories, experiments and puzzles--mine as well as others--that elicit your own creative and uniquely woven yarn, not passing out step-by-step prescriptions. (How adventuresome would that be?) Lest I forget, I'll repeat this as mantra to myself: "Think questions, not answers. We're storytellers, not teachers," as presenter Ashley Charbonnet said at the start of the NOVAC Hero's Journey for Screenwriters talk.
dontmilkme asked: In Life of Pi, which story did you choose to believe at the end, or which story do you believe is true? And why?
"Given the option, I will always choose the story with wild animals, magic, and divine intervention.
Being the fact that the Life of Pi is itself a work of fiction, both stories are of course untrue. Why not choose the story of transformation and wonder? :)
Months ago, I walked into a Balinese haven trapped amidst the concrete grittiness of Oakland because it was called Monkey Forest Road and because from afar it seemed to beckon as an oasis. Another fall evening, I was blessed to try a warm homemade pumpkin pudding at a 25th Street warehouse during the Oakland Art Murmur. I put two and two together and realized that the warehouse housed the artisanal imports from Bali that then get showcased at Monkey Forest Road. The next day, I raved to the barista (I used to know her name, but I left Oakland just before Halloween) about the incredible sweet concoction. "Oh, yeah, the owner made that--special recipe."
I sat down with a cup of oolong, and leafed through a coffee table book lying on a thick hardwood table called, Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance.What I recall from the book--now a half year later--is that it said Balinese culture centered around spirituality and the arts. I whispered, "I wish I lived in a culture that revolved around spirituality and art." I'm interested in a culture where spirituality and art are front and center, not at the fringes. (No, everyone doesn't have to abide by that as a monoculture either; prefer to cherish and honor the flourishing of many, many ways to move about life.)
Not long after that wish, I was introduced to the owner who had heard about my high compliments on the pumpkin pudding. We had the most charming discussion (most of it I'm not privy to share since there seems a particular intimacy there that wasn't to be recorded) about calling and moving towards that calling. In addition, I was introduced to a dancer that also worked there. They attempted to explain an untranslatable word to me: taksu.
Taksu was the most important and elusive quality for an artist to convey and embody--a divine inspiration that breathes through the artist and the work.
“A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him for many reasons. But the poet persists. He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone. He tries to be timeless in a society built on time.” ― Jack Kerouac
Then there's a chapter in Adyashanti's book called "Coming Completely Out of Hiding." I don't particularly like that chapter. Yet it remains an evocative request: come completely out of hiding. It might mean "come completely out of hiding as a separate self," although what's the difference.
Being taksu in private, penning journal entries for my own eyes, is easy in the same vein that claiming nirvana in a cave is easy.
Expressing taksu takes a willingness to be open and vulnerable come what may.
Sometimes that willingness may mean the willingness to possibly offend or confuse or be misunderstood. A willingness to share even when I'm simultaneously persuading myself that my voice has caused loss of income--of potential clients and customers; so wouldn't it be more prudent to stay mum? A willingness to risk even if our art doesn't fit neatly into any how-you-are-supposed-to-make-a-livelihood boxes. Yada yada... these are a few examples of the what if's of the ego's endless story-mongering treadmill.
Contemplating a close friend's recent bout with carpal tunnel syndrome (they use their hand quite a bit as a musician) the other day when the symbolism leapt up from a Seth Godin blog post (emphasis at the end is mine):
With a sure hand
The charisma of a great speech, a powerful graphic design or a well-designed tool (and yes, a well-designed tool can have charisma) comes from certainty.
Not the arrogance of, "I am right and you are not," but from the confidence/certainty of, "I need to say it or draw it or present it just this way and I want you to hear it."
Graphic design that fades into the background, that recycles the safe or is merely banal does nothing for us. But the sure hand of someone who understands what she says and what she wants to communicate can't help but touch us.
This is the difference between the mediocre abstract painting at the local crafts fair and the powerful piece at MOMA. This is the difference between 8 bullet points on a slide and a picture that moves us.
Confidence usually implies that you know it's going to work. I'm not talking about that, because only a fool is confident all the time. No, the sure hand can be open and vulnerable and connected, but above all, at least right this moment, it is sure enough to speak up, without hiding.
Then I watched this video by Amanda Palmer that at first glance seems to be about the future of music (or at least the future of musicians), but it's more about being an artist and relationships built upon trust and vulnerability. Oh, I've heard of Amanda Palmer before, but never paid her any mind. The short talk is worth a listen as she exemplifies that sure hand--open, vulnerable, connected, sure enough to express even if that means some people vilify her, and no hiding.
Who knows? Perhaps there is a cost to being open--there's no guarantee. I'm now willing to bet that there's more of a cost to self-protectiveness.
"My approach to being an artist in society is that the things that you do should have a really big impact. It's not really worth it unless that's the case. When we do it in a public context, it can do it in a fashion that allows us to have the experience together." - Leo Villareal, The Bay Lights
Sneak peak a public project I'm working on: It began coalescing on December 21, 2012. I was entranced by silky rose petals swirling around a crackling fire in Sara's backyard. An intimate gathering to usher in the Golden Age, the next cycle of the Satya Yuga, as many Hindus believe. Many of those gathered have been on pilgrimages to India, lean toward Hinduism or other Indian-influenced traditions such as Advaita Vedanta. Me, I'm inclined to perceive as "golden age" an ever-present intimacy with the timeless that's not coupled to any date.
As I've been researching New Orleans' history for an indie transmedia project, I noticed that some historians view the prosperity and cosmopolitan diversity of antebellum New Orleans during the steamboat era as a "golden age." Picking up on this theme, enter in opera singer Sam Rosen. Traveling through a temporal landscape and landing in different collective peaks in our past, together we'll blaze forth a rough pioneer trail bread-crumbed in the form of correspondences and soundscapes from golden age to golden age right up to the next golden age, whenever and wherever.
BONUS: I opened my friend's copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson's collected essays (part and parcel of my research into 1850s culture) randomly to The Poet, which both glimmers with taksu itself and powerfully speaks of it. Worth savoring the whole essay as it's beyond what any narrow definition of poet and what that implies:
"This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, -- him they will suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that.
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the mind;" not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible." - The Poet, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Whenever a mind is simple and receives divine wisdom, old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Sharing a short and sweet excerpt as I'm running out the door. Finished this week, Rocket Boys--now on my short list of favorite books. It's a first person account of a group of high school kids inspired by Sputnik to learn rocket science on their own in a small mining town.
This passage below takes place Thanksgiving weekend 1959 in Coalwood, West Virginia. (Yes, it's a true story.)
And happy gratefulness to all of you today. (Bonus, I'm launching--nope, not a rocket--a pop-up art project Penny for your Charms that urges you to also walk on water. Hope you can join in over the next month as it unfolds.)
I used up almost all of my [propellant material] zinc dust loading the Auk XXIII. Getting more was a problem. The BMCA [the boys' rocket club] treasury was bare. Still, I wasn't terribly worried about it. I just had this belief that whenever I needed anything to build my rockets, somehow it was going to be there, provided by the Lord or whatever foolish angels had taken on the BCMA as a project. O'Dell said he'd think about a way to get us some money.
. . . I was tense as I began the coundown. Although Quentin was confident, I was a little afraid of the big rocket. I took a deep breath and turned the firing switch on the professional-looking console Billy and Sherman had built.
. . . There was no sign of our rocket at all. It had simply vanished. Quentin rang up and reported the same result downrange. A towering funnel of smoke gradually drifted over us. Auk XXIII was up there somewhere. What if it came down on the crowd or on us? What if it went uprange and landed in Coalwood again?
"I see it!" Billy yelped. Good old sharp-eyed Billy!
"Where?"
"There!"
It was just a dot, but it grew, and it was downrange, although veering toward Rocket Mountain. It hit the top of a big tree, which shivered from the impact, as if to let us know it had caught our rocket. Picking up our shovels, we ran down the slack, the crowd cheering us as we went past.
"Forty-two seconds," Roy Lee cried breathlessly as we ran.
"Seven thousand fifty-six feet," both Quentin and I called out at about the same moment, both of us capable now of working out the calculation in our heads. It was our highest rocket yet, but it wasn't what my nozzle design had predicted. "What happened?" I worried as we pounded down the slack. "According to the equations, it should have gone three thousand feet higher."
"Don't know," Quentin puffed. "Have to look at the rocket."
Billy led us up the mountain, weaving through the trees and bursting through a line of thick rhododendron into a green glade beneath a ridge. Auk XXVIII was buried there, up to its fins in soft, wet loam. O'Dell looked around and held up his hand. "Stop, boys," he ordered. "Don't trample this place!"
We pulled up short. "Why?"
He dropped to his knees beside a big oak and dug carefully with his shovel, pulling up a gnarly root. "You know what this is?"
When we all shrugged, he smiled. "Money."
"Not another crazy scheme," Roy Lee groaned.
"No, this one's for real. It's ginseng. This glade's full of it. I've never seen so much!"
"What the hell is ginseng?" Roy Lee asked.
"Indian medicine. People over in Japan and places like that think it cures everything."
"How much is it worth?"
"Well," he said as he dug up another root. "I don't think we're going to have to worry about zinc-dust money for a while."
I had vaguely heard of the stuff being dug around the county, but had never actually seen any of it before. I looked at the dirty ginseng specimen O'Dell handed me, thinking of God and whatever angels He had assigned to BCMA. "The Lord preserves the simple," was Mom's response when I mentioned this to her.
Although I've been to museums and other artistic and creative venues and shows lately after a long hiatus, I found his presence to be most illuminating for me personally. This is what I took in:
Saul Williams inspires other poets and musicians to create--and he does this through inspiration. Sure, there's always the worshipful fans, yet for the most part he seems to make you really want to make, rather than just sit in awe spellbound and mute over his genius.
He invited the audience to break the 'fouth wall' (and he used that specific phrase as in let's "drop the fourth wall" and "dialogue"). The fourth wall is that conceptual yet strict adherence to separating participants into passive audience or active actor. This is what I've been intrigued with for ages: participatory art. I write more about Saul's invitation to call-and-response or to a jam session in a new blog, The Stream is the Medium.
The last thing I learned was he means it when he says, "I only do what I feel like doing." (Just for context, the tone was gracious and it was the last sentence in response to an audience members' request that he say a curse word, although I think he said a variation of that theme when someone else asked for specific poem to be read.) That open secret is the key to his success. Saul Williams doesn't apologize for being true to expression.
To my detriment, I often attempt to read (or prejudge) others' expectations, judgments, opinions and unspoken 'rules.' So I do not do what I honestly feel like doing. Lately, I've asked myself when evaluating an opportunity, "If I take money out the equation, would I still do this?" I used to think I wasn't compromising enough. Now I realize in making the leap from mainstream technologist and marketer to an artist, I've consistently compromised vision and inspiration to the point its power is diluted. Following inspiration isn't sissy stuff and demands staying true to it despite core conditioning to abandon anything that doesn't fit the static quo and the ol' fight-or-flight survival instinct.
"Culture is likely to break out in a society not when its poietai begin to voice a line contrary to that of society, but when they begin to ignore all lines whatsoever and concern themselves with bringing the audience back into play -- not competitive play, but play that affirms itself as play." - Infinite and Finite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, by James Carse
And, since I've not been blogging that consistently, I've a backlog of annoucements to share (they're all invitations to jam) and want to get these out since they could involve you, if you'd like to participate and engage:
1. I'm in Oakland, CA right now. Perhaps for a few weeks, perhaps longer. How long I stay is predicated on if there are projects to jam on with other playmates, collaborators and muses. Are you in the Bay Area? Are you interested in engagement, play, street theater, possibility spaces, urban games, storytelling the future, participatory art, incubating dreams? Drop me a note. I'll go anywhere where I can make a real contribution.
2. I'm currently engaged in an awesome project, EdZedOmega.org--a participatory, improvisational online documentary where six teens drop out of high school this fall semester and go their own way in a self-directed learning. They're crowdsourcing OUR (i.e. as in us, you, me, you!) visions and stories around education and how to improve it. (Check out this WIRED article on the behind-the-scenes to Ed Zed Omega.) If there's a downside (for me) it's that nearly everyone on the team is in Minneapolis and I'm in Oakland (and I've really yearning for face-to-face collaboration of late).
3. I've been kicking around a transactive narrative + real-world experience + urban theater (in select cities) juxtaposing the year 2020 with the multicultural, cross-pollinating Golden Age of Al-Andalus (medieval Spain) to spur people’s own dream ventures. In conversation with a partner that's into this idea too in New York. This is happenening and soon; may mean anything from moving to NY to visiting Andalucia this winter as a group pilgrimage (that's YOU I'm speaking about group).
4. "I was once a sleeping ocean and in a dream became jealous of a pond." Or, "So amazing this choir of socks, shoes, shirt, skirt, undergarments, earth, sky, suns, and moons. No wonder I too, now, sing all day." Or, "Have wings that feared ever touched the sun? I was born when all I once feared--I could love." I've been very inspired by Sufi poetry lately (goes with #3) and am leaning towards visiting New Orleans for a spell and conjuring a street improv and urban game of sorts (during New Orleans Fringe Festival perhaps?) that may weave in Rabia--the 8th century female mystic and poet born in Basra, Iraq that was such an influence on Rumi--as a central character. Do you live in New Orleans? Intrigued? Make this a magical mystery tour where we live from a poetic perspective? (Timing: Halloween to mid-November 2012.)
5. I'm facilitating the exchange in experiential, online workshop on using the Web as an artistic medium in its own right. (The Internet is often delegated to being explanatory, promotional or distributive for other creative media.) It starts October 8th and runs seven weeks. Afterwards, assuming there was enough give-and-take feedback to have complete course materials--I'll package it up as a Creative Commons-licensed course that any student anywhere in the world with Internet access can use to teach themselves. (Limited to small group; minimum ten students to ensure generative feedback.)
That's not even the half of it, yet enough of a seed to jump in and ask, participate, sip, write, sketch, dialogue, share.... Yep, first and last of all, the art of living.
"First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations."
—Paul Klee, jotting in his journal his dreams and aspirations
Art credits: My favorite visual interactive artist's latest: The Weather Project now at the Tate Modern, by Olafur Eliasson, although Olafur himself calls the exhibit The Little Sun; PaPaYa art and gifts' credo.
Fear and the creative process is and isn't spoken about much. Here's a snippet from a e-letter I wrote a musically-inclined friend today. What the heck, I'll publish it.
oh, it's john cage's 100th birthday today (um if he were alive i suppose or wherever he is in time-space)
julie lazar spoke at SFMoMa yesterday with tons of slides since she and Cage collaborated on a visual composition (rolywholyover circus) that traveled to five museums
anyhow, julie said she moved to NYC when she was 17 to become a dancer. she worked in ticket booth at lincoln center for day job and happened to get some tickets to see a john cage performance
she said, "I didn't like what I saw or heard but i decided then and there to dedicate my life to artists that help us [didn't catch precisely how she worded it: shattered our illusions? expanded our vision? etc]... My idea of what life was was blown open."
isn't that amazing?!
she didn't like it, but it didn't matter--it was how it jolted her out of her expectations that mattered
i often WORRY (needlessly) that i will be judged, shunned, exiled, crucified or something worse for doing precisely that--jostling/shattering people's expectations [rather than bending over backwards meeting expectations].... and yet that's why it moved her...
- e
What I'm deeply interested in can be deemed quixotic, as in Don Quixote--who tended to be scorned and mocked for his chivalry. (If you doubt this, look up dictionary definitions for quixotic, such as: "foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals.") However, I did read a paragraph recently that called to me: "Don Quixote holds a good-hearted vision of the world as a noble place, and so strong is this vision that by the end of the novel, it has in some mysterious way transformed his material surroundings." Exactly.
Brian Clark in an interview with Andrea Phillips says, ""Artistically, I like to believe that we have the opportunity to create a sense of wonder about the world around us, to wake people up from the plodding through life with a little moment that can start to open the doors of perception and unlock a sense of power to remake the world the way you want it to be. For at least the last decade, much of my work at least incorporates elements of this ideal of "reality hacking".... "
I recently reading a moving part (the rest of the book isn't as personal albeit it's great too and I highly recommend it if you're interested in the subject, yet the personal story is why I resonated with this section) in A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling by Andrea Phillips about how she found herself suddenly unemployed in December 2007.
"And as much as I was desperate to do paying work, I was equally hungry to do fulfilling work. Perplex City had been three years of incredible creative collaboration with an exceptional team, and it was gone, gone, gone. I was lonely and unproductive. I was terrified that my career as a creator had ground to a halt and would never move forward again. I was waiting for a break. Waiting for an offer. Waiting for someone to notice me and tell me what to do next. And waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
And then I started talking to my old friend and fellow Cloudmaker Jay Bushman. He had recently launched a Twitter adaptation of a Herman Melville story called The Good Captain. Every day for three months, The Good Captain spun out a few short sentences of the tale of a drifting spaceship and the robot mutiny that had led to the ship's dire situation.
I found myself profoundly jealous of Bushman's ability to create and promote something so interesting when it wasn't his job and he had no funding. What did he have that I didn't?
The answer, of course, was nothing at all. Nothing but the sheer drive to create, that is.
This ignited the spark in me that had been missing: the passion to just make something with whatever resources I had on hand. Since I was so dead broke, those resources amounted to my brain, my fingers to type with, the computer I already owned, and the Internet connection I was already paying for.
[Andrea explains some projects she created using free resources like Twitter, Google Calendar (for time travel, of course) and a Wiki fiction experiment.]
. . . A curious correlation arose. the more indie stuff I made, the more paying work I got, too, and on an amazing array of projects. Why? There are a lot of people who talk about transmedia. It turns out that there are precious few who are actually tring to make something with what they have right now.
. . . And it's nothing special about me: you can do it, too. Just prove that you have the ambition to create, no matter what your situation. That puts you at a decided advantage.
So my biggest, most important lesson is this: you can't wait for permission or funding or a contract or a job. Once you get this--and I mean really, really get this--you and your career will be transformed. You will be liberated. Don't hang around hoping that somebody specifically asks you to make something. Find something to get excited about, and then, as the Nike ads go, Just Do It." - Andrea Phillips, A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling
I too find fear disguises itself as "waiting for not right now" as somehow some other point might be the right time, right opportunity, right job, right place, right teammates, right funding, right attitude--yada yada. I recall opening a book this past spring where an interviewer asked Bob Dylan for the secret to his success. He replied, "I was doing what I could with what I had where I was."
I've been carrying around a brochure for Steve & Kate's summer camps for a few weeks now in my purse. I'm not in their target audience, yet it spoke to me loud and clear:
"At Steve & Kate's, campers step into a world packed with possibilities: for experiencing new sensations, for expressing themselves, for exploring their unique passions and potential. The results are unexpected, and they're unexpectedly rich.
One camper dives deep into digital filmmaking. Another discovers a passion for dance. Or chess. A camper becomes engrossed in making the ultimate spaghetti sauce. Or developing Leo Messi-like touch on the soccer pitch. These discoveries are all the more exhilarating because campers make them for themselves.
This is a world liberated from adult judgments and expectations, and campers flourish in it."
Even more enchanting: "Our camp conforms to kids, not the other way around."
“Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.
“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. - "The Busy Trap," by Tim Kreider, New York Times, June 30, 2012
I would love to start a 'camp' (ideally, both virtual and physical), although I've been wavering on the precise spelling out of this all-ages camp (more accurately ages 13 to 185) geared to the child-like wonder and inspiration in each of us.
One of the most touching details in Vermeer's oeuvre is that of the two children absorbed in their play in the Little Street. Although they occupy a small portion of the painting, the magical atmosphere that pervades the work would be deprived of much of its intimate warmth without their presence. As is befitting of Vermeer's enigmatic nature, neither the children's faces nor their play is revealed. - an overview of The Little Street by Vemeer
And I need to reveal my own voice before I go forth to harmonize with others. (I'd already recovered my voice circa 2006, in one sense, I just wasn't belting it out in public. In other nomenclature, it's often termed hiding your light under a bushel.) Lately I have shielded myself from writing, sharing, interacting, speaking publically because I don't conform, and agreement seems like an unquestionable virtue in this culture. But it's not among my virtues.
My highest ideal is to interact with a diversity of people with mutual respect, without any of us needing to convert anyone else away from who they are or judge another's choices. I don't claim this an ideal for the entire world, as that feels imposing. It's my own desire within my play-sphere of humans and other beings.
To that end, I started to jot physical camp ideas here (there's a real-live-tangible-awesome-face-to-face space available for lease in Santa Clara/San Jose right now).
And, I started to write out things I'm afraid to tell other people in a long list in order to get over myself and emancipate my voice. Here's a few things that relate to multiplicity and voice in that list. (The rest of list won't be blogged, rather posted as a FAQ or within the About page):
I wish for multiplicity. Don't be like me, please! No mimicry, no conformity. To that end, I have been quite inspired lately by learning more of my ancestral heritage, and researching the Golden Age of Al-Andalus in medieval Spain. It was quite possible a very vibrant and fertile time period of multiplicity where many types of people of different worldviews crossed paths and co-existed. Ancient Greek texts were translated to Hebrew and Arabic and Latin, and delicately doted over in universities and libraries. Poetry and singing flourished alongside with pomegranate fruit and olive oil trade. Not my highest ideal, but nonetheless a shining example during what is commonly referred to as The Dark Ages.
I don't know. My standard answer when people ask me about the future, especially "my" future. It tends to infuriate people. At that point, I might make up an answer but it's only to soothe them, not because I actually know.
I have friends and acquaintances from all nationalities. Some are transients (no I.D. like Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild), Republicans, anarchists, Libertarians, theists, atheists, academics, circus performers, nomads, homebodies, vegans, hunters, crafters, bicycle riders, SUV drivers, saunterers, pilgrims, hitchhikers, train-hoppers, children, elders, shamans, Catholic priests, real estate brokers, dancers, hat-makers, scientists, tantrikas, athletes, artists, monks, hostel owners, strip-tease dancers, drug dealers, homeschoolers, educators, poets, startup CEOs, millionaire venture capitalists, homeless veterans, policemen. I usually don't mention this because not all these people would necessarily want to meet the so-called 'other', but that doesn't preclude me from finding value in them for myself. Apologies if my giving credence to another offends you or this indicates that I am now not worthy of belonging to a tribe. I don't understand all this Other'ing and category labels as exclusionary devices, yet I understand that it happens.
I'm reposting an oldie but goodie today that evokes Independence, at least in my mind. It was originally written on June 28, 2005--nearly seven years ago today.
I'm back in San Jose, CA at least for the moment, where this was once written. Barefoot Coffee Roasters is no longer as edgy and independent as it once was, and there's no longer a chalkboard in their bathroom. The Beatles reference, "All you need is love," turned out to be prophetic (you'd have to read several posts to follow the connections). And how the rest of the story unfolded will wait for a future post.
Jun 28, 2005
When's the Last Time You Tried to Pay the Rent with Love?
There is only one success - to be able to spend the rest of your life in your own way. - Christopher Morley
Two weeks ago I'm sitting at a stool writing my bio at Barefoot Coffee Roasters (a fantastic organic coffeehouse in Santa Clara, CA). I'm supposed to come up with a witty list of bullet points per request to sum up my education, work and adventures. I get up to go to the bathroom mainly to stretch from the hours spent in front of the laptop. I'd been staring at the screen stumped as to how to succinctly articulate that rollercoaster adventure that spanned the years 2001-2004.
The bottom half of the bathroom wall is entirely wrapped in chalkboard. And there's a plastic tub with colored chalk to tempt our expressive side. Someone else has written in baby blue:
All You Need is Love - John Lennon
A dissenter responds in pink pastel:
Yes, thank you. We've all heard the song. When's the last time you tried to pay the rent with love?
That my friends pretty much sums up the core question in my life today. I use it as an open-ended question to dwelve into rather than an abrupt and cynical that's-just-the-way-it-is-folks statement.
I know, I know I said I'd come clean with my story. That's not entirely possible in the attention-deficit blogosphere. Only a sneak peek fits here. It doesn't help that I'm not entirely motivated to speak about the past. The beauty and freedom of blogging is writing about the here and now in the here and now.
Yet I thought you should know that although this here blog is often listed in the business blog category, I personally know almost nothing about conventional quote success unquote. I've only been a millionaire on paper. Heck, haven't we all been millionaires on paper, in our imaginations? If you resonate with Chris Morley's definition, well, then perhaps I can be more helpful.
Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier, could give some advice. - C.S. Lewis
In many ways, my story isn't unique. I've met so many folks that have gone through a near-bankruptcy, the dot-com crash, business betrayal, and divorce. It matters little if it was all in a span of a year or three or ten.
From there, each of us goes down our own pathway. I think what's important is not so much the turning points themselves, but the aftermath. How we learn, digest, integrate, rebuild in that in-between time to use the lessons and wake-up calls fruitfully. Along with my father's death at seventeen and more recently witnessing the tsunami, the avalanche of events circa 2001-2002 have been among the turning points of my life.
In hindsight I was fortunate enough to have so much go so wrong in short order that I couldn't pretend that I knew anything about anything. The Buddha has said: Forgo everything you have thought significant until now. (Uh, easier said than done.) I was stripped of everything I thought significant and I was stripped of being a know-it-all. I was hungry for answers, and this time simply stark questions remained. That in itself was a remarkable turning point: Evelyn didn't know.
Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to them that knock it shall be opened. - Jesus, The Sermon on the Mount
(Note: that I can even quote Jesus inpublic forgodsakes shows the great strides I've made. This would have been unthinkable - what would they think!? - just two years ago.)
Let's switch to another story... Don Listwin was No. 2 at Cisco when he left to become CEO of Openwave in September 2000. (Talk about bad timing. Uh, strike that, it did allow Listwin to cash out all his Cisco stock options.)
Yet the Internet bubble had already begun to burst, and [Don] Listwin says the four years he spent as CEO turned out to be the hardest of his life. "I had to lay off half my 2,500 employees. I got divorced. And my mom died." Listwin says....
He was at the hospital, near Vancouver, where his mom had died less than an hour earlier. His father and sister had just arrived, and the mourning process had begun in earnest. Just as a nurse came into the room and asked if the family would like to donate Grace Listwin's corneas, Listwin's mobile phone rang. It was Openwave's CFO, reporting in that they had missed their numbers for the quarter. "Thanks for telling me, but at the moment that's just going to have to take a back seat." - "When the Dream Changes", Paul B. Carroll, Worthwhile Magazine, July/August 2005
I'd been the first employee of a golden-boy-founded Internet start-up. That same September 2000 that Listwin joined Openwave we tried to get a second round of funding. I can only picture the men gathered around the board room as our iconic venture capitalist yelled and stomped when he uncovered that said golden boy, now chairman of the board, was merely working part-time. Everything quickly unraveled.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. - Steve Jobs
Listwin walked away from Openwave and now devotes his life to fighting cancer at his non-profit. (Listwin's mission is focused on the crux of the cancer problem because "money is being made from treatment, not from detection.") I only use Listwin as a counterpoint to myself. It really doesn't matter: you can be a multi-millionaire in a velvet-lined prison cell of your own making or you can be a nomadic gypsy tossed from port to port, freedom and security is totally independent of your bank account.
Money isn't evil. It is nothing. - Anonymous
As catchwords that pull me forward, authenticity, purpose and integrity were the drivers that fueled my personal quest. These catchwords guided me quite well for the last few years. They fueled my curiousity. The funny thing was I practically ended up right where I'd started, or at least it looks that way externally.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.- T.S. Eliot
I watched many of my compatriots (especially women) leave behind technology and business to heal the world and escape to be 'more authentic': from joining non-profit ventures to becoming Reiki masters to listening deeply as a personal coach. It would require a book-length post to chronicle my journey - so I'll cut to the chase. I got to the point where I realized I didn't need to go anywhere to be myself. I didn't need to go anywhere to heal. Trust me, there's a whole lot of healing needed right here within business.
The old catchphrases have lost their mystery. Ever since the tsunami, I have new catchphrases: open-heartedness, selflessness, and grace. These catchwords are proverbial carrots at the end of the stick - pretty distant but compelling. Yet, they are on the very same authenticity continuum that I embarked in 2002.
Ultimately authenticity is interwined with fearlessness. You can read Steve Job's 2005 Stanford commencement speech. It's remarkably inspiring. Four days later, one can easily be back to reading the weekly status report and glumly punching the clock. I know this. Verywell. Your fear, your doubt, your resistance, your homeostatis andyour obstacles aren't specifically addressed in Job's speech, are they?
Inspiration doesn't pay the bills. We dismiss millionaires like Jobs and Listwin. Yeah, right, what do they know about fear and failure, we mumble. Fine, then (although they're ultimately flesh and bones - andspirit - too).
I grew up in an immigrant family, so 'Do what you love and the money will follow' was hardly my parent's life-long advice. To top it off, they were so overprotective and fearful of outsiders that riding my bicycle around the block, going over to a friend's home, having a boyfriend, and certainly the school trip to D.C. were strictly forbidden.
In a parallel universe I would have been an English lit and philosophy major, but even a journalism degree was too risky. In my first semester as a copy editor of the university paper, I quickly saw that seniors were having a tough time securing ill-paying reporting jobs. Needless to say, I graduated with a BSEE. (Actually, I love the art of computers too, but in my heart of hearts it's not my first love.)
Recently, at a journalism conference an Indian-Japanese comedian is introduced thusly, "Like all good Indians and all good Japanese, he became an engineer." This is so true it hurts like a Dilbert cartoon. His humorous quips as Andy Groves' demo boy eventually paved the way to his new career. The Indian journalists foremost question to him: "What did your parents say?" I'm scratching the surface, but this is the firm foundation I then laid my own heap of fears upon.
"So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time," is plain as day in Jobs' pep talk. He continues:
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. - Steve Jobs
In 2002-2003, I bounced around the Bay Area sleeping on friend's couches (no floors, so I am one up on Jobs ;-)) and there were days I could barely afford peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner. After one consulting engagement in Europe (after a long dry spell, and expenses were only reimbursed later), I wandered alone through Italian cobblestone streets teeming with cafes and shops hoping I could find something to eat with the change in my pocket. It amounted to less than a euro. Although I went hungry that one day, I gorged myself on the morning flight back to the U.S. on business class.
But as I've said before, the summer of 2002 was priceless. All the money I'd hoarded during my lucrative engineering days had never granted me a lasting sense of peace and joy and freedom. With nowhere further to fall, I gleaned what intuition actually was and followed it; I experienced the expansiveness of impersonal unconditional love - a love that emanates from the universe; and I was experimented with what freedom without strings attached might look like. It was that indescribable love that I trusted. It was an imperfect often halting trust, but it got me by. In an about face to the controlled will and rationality that had shaped my life, I simply trusted that it would (ok, how's might even) all work out OK.
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. - Steve Jobs
What motivates me now? You will think me absurd for saying this in the same breath as the word business - and perhaps you've already surmised it: Yup, I am definitely hinting about enlightenment as the endpoint on the authenticity continuum.
We could regard enlightenment as the complete experience of fearlessness. – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Shambhala Sun, March 2005
Enlightenment: that's my carrot catchword these days. Althoughenlightenment feels nebulous. It's more concrete when I translate it and contemplate opening my heart and living in grace.
As I write, I feel more absurd. The concept sounds absurd. Enlightenment? Hello, it's 2005. I work for a living. And I am attempting enlightenment in the most (or one of the most) materialistic regions in the most materialistic country while employed in a materialisitic profession. What gall!
According to Buddhist teachings, the buddha-nature is present in every living being, and thenatural state of one's mind, when it's not misconstrued by the power of negative thoughts, is perfection. - Matthieu Ricard
They say Matthieu Ricard, the son of a French intellectual, "gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism." Uh, what exactly is this promise behind a promising career, anyway? Does it have any relations in the family of happiness?
At a 2003 conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin who oversaw the experiments there, described his follow-up studies. Davidson, who had spent time in Asia studying meditation when he was younger, flashed a PowerPoint slide of a bell curve rising like a red mountain out of a flat landscape. It was a graph, he explained, charting 150 people's normal brain states. For the great majority, that state was a mix of left prefrontal cortex (positive emotion) and right prefrontal cortex (negative emotion) activity. But there was one tiny "data point" at the chart's far edge, a solitary pilgrim walking away from the looming red peak of statistical normalcy. That point was Matthieu Ricard,scanned during his compassion meditation. His reading was entirely off the curve in the area of positive emotion -- the most extreme result ever recorded. - "Scanning the Monk",Marc Ian Barasch, Utne Reader, March/April 2005
For extreme results of happiness and compassion, I'd go back immediately and wipe the tad-less-than-positive absurd from my vocabulary.
The eighty-four adepts, or mahasiddhas, who lived in India in the second to twelfth centuries found it necessary do spiritual practice in conjunction with their worldly activities. For instance, King Indrabhuti ruled a large kingdom and was surrounded by great luxury. Yet he received mahamudra [Buddhist] instructions, practiced them while ruling his Kingdom, and achieved the supreme accomplishment of mahamudra - enlightenment in one lifetime. Other mahasiddhas were cobblers, arrow makers, sweepers, and even practitioners of such humble occupations as grinding sesame seeds...There was for them no contradiction between the work that they had to do and the practice of mahamudra; no conflict came up between Dharma [application of Buddha's teaching] practice and worldly activities. - Essentials of Mahamudra: Looking Directly at the Mind, by Khenchen Thranga Rinpoche
What motivates me? Today, Mother Theresa's words spur me too: "Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person." And I continue to ask myself: When's the last time you tried to pay the rent with love?
Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whoever loves much, performs much, and can accomplish much, and that which is done in love is well done. - Vincent van Gogh
Now ask yourself: When's the last time you tried to paid the rent with love?
"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).
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
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.
Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
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.
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.
Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
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.
Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
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.
Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
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.
Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
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.
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.
Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.
Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."
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.
Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
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.
Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.
Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 Suareztakes 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 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 Usgot 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.
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.
“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).
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.'
"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.
"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.
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
"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.
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.
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."
"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?
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.... 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 wantto 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 wantto 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
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
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 finishedThe 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).
"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."
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 asHidden 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
"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)
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
"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."
"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 Nephewbetter 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
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.
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).
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.
"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.
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.
"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
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
{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---}
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.
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
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.
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 creditsVisit(detail of entire painting above) by Mari Klarwein; Breath of Gaia, byJosephine 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
"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living." - Joseph Campbell
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