Crossroads Dispatches

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

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

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

Leaping. Springing. Generative, generous, circulating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

Yep:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus:

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

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

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

"Why are you called the alchemist?"

"Because that's what I am."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Destiny is a funny thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

spirited away by dragon adventures and ego dystonic fevers

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

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

Often new and too edgy things reside underground.

Although, I'm tiring of hiding underground.

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

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

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

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

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

What's happening?

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

What's that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deutsch shares:

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

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

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

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

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

Your humble wood dragon,
Evelyn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A glimpse of EXPLAINING:

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

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

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

Here's a glimpse of EXPLORING:

Speaking of sugared petals, here's an exercise:

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

What might you serve?

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

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

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

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

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

I'd have sugared rose petals.

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

What would you serve?

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

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

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