Crossroads Dispatches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our economy, too, is on a verge. " 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every tool should nourish the things upon which it depends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the 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.

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

"Game-changing."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"...impossible things are happening every day" - Cinderella and Fairy Godmother duet

“Sometimes those that know us best don’t necessarily support our wildest dreams and deepest core beliefs when it is beyond their own experiences, and spirit-friends are necessary to keep the flame alive.” - M.B., Filmmaker, Tennessee

In the Vietnamese new year which began yesterday, it's the Year of the Cat. (Year of the Rabbit in China.)

"The Cat Year is about following your clear inner truth through subtle currents, psychic waves, underlying thought forms that require extra sensitivity to navigate." - Mark Borax

Chúc mừng năm mới!

"Tradition also dictates that you should clean your entire home before the new year so you start off with a clean slate," says writer Thien-Kim Lam. I often wonder why people lust for a clean slate. Nothing to lose? The perception of freedom and peace? I'm still confounded by people that are envious of my position--"you're so unconstrained" as one person put it, as I've "lost" and/or given away whatever it is they might fear losing (from partner/relationship/marriage, job/career, house, car, all savings, etc. etc.)

Maybe this is an enviable position, but.... but, I still have my reputation and self-image to uphold! So, as minimalist as you might go, there appears to be always ONE more thing we can cling to that is holding us "back" from giving it all we've got, I suppose.

In his essay, The Missing Near-Future, Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired) writes about science fiction and speculative fiction story-telling as a platform for hashing out and fleshing visionary options--ours, yours, mine:

"The near future – let’s peg it 2020 and beyond -- is a blank because there is almost no vision of a near-future that seems both desirable and plausible. Most stories, “worlds,” and scenarios of say the year 2050 are dystopian. Take your pick of nuclear self-annihilation, mortal pandemics, planetary floods, robotic overthrow, alien invasion, or fascist apocalypse. They are all very plausible, but not desirable.

The advantage of the far future is we don’t have to be told the story of how we arrived there, of how we passed through the near future. It’s far away enough that the creators can punt past it.  But the near future is such a conundrum that is it has disappeared from our culture."

Pretty cool, Kelly used the word "blank" beause he doesn't know what's next. The unknown. That fuzzy near-future where anything beyond the very next most obvious step is fuzzy at best. Another kind of clean slate is stepping into the unknown, and then then the next unknown, one foot after the other.

I don't feel the near future is as much as a conundrum as Kelly asserts. I don't think he's looked under all the nooks and crannies. Many idealists tame their findings and share something "plausible" enough to blend in and maybe this fails the "desirability" test (mediocre is usually not that desirable); many form their own groups in seclusion, or they cast themselves off in (frustrated?) isolation from the "plausible" constraints of community. Honestly, I yielded to the third option these past two years. Perhaps, this tyranny of plausibility is changing. Perhaps it is not.

All I know is I agree with my friend D.K. in "our right to be our idiosyncratic selves and still belong to the group of our choice."

"Man plans, God laughs. In that case I'd rather be God." - me

Last night, I watched a Bruce Lipton video where he asserted that although he was successfully publishing his stem cell research in the medical journals, "I found myself to be in a very small crowd of one in my community because I had violated the central dogma." Later, Lipton says that small children, due to primarily to theta brain wave orientation until they are six years of age, are easily imprinted with other's "plausible" expectations, opinions, and belief systems: "What we acquire in our development is that we're just average people."

Back in December, I started writing the narrative in the last post (there's more, although not online yet) for io9's Environmental Writing Contest: "Your story should deal meaningfully and plausibly with some aspect of environmental disaster. There are no limits on the kind of disaster you explore."

"The tyranny of the norm is that part of modern existence that seduces a person out of their truth in favor of conforming to the pressure of collective thought forms." - Mark Borax

Didn't take me even 1000 words into writing out my near-future scenario before I realized, "Nope, this isn't going to meet their "plausibility" standards."

And what did they mean there were "no limits" on imagining the disaster itself, yet I am limited to a plausibility constraint when I consider the solution? Huh? I kept hearing the refrain echoing: "Fol-de-rol and fiddle dee dee and fiddley faddley foodle all the dreamers in the world are dizzy in the noodle..."

"Science classes are unscientific; students just sit there." - skateboarding physicist Dr. Tae

I've a fondness for dizzy in the noodle dreamers... a.k.a. disruptive innovators, like Dr. Tae. He quit teaching university-level physics because he's looking for better ways than the status quo to teach science. He's not afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes, and offers his two cents on a new vision for teaching and learning.

So I'm going to start singing this new refrain, "For the world is full of zanies and fools who don't believe in sensible rules and won't believe what sensible people say. And because these daft and dewey eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes, impossible things are happening every day."

Bonus: Cinderella: Who are you?

Fairy Godmother:I'm your fairy godmother.
Cinderella: How beautiful you are.
Fairy Godmother: I'm made of all of your most beautiful hopes and dreams and wishes.
Cinderella: Oh, Fairy godmother, I have only one wish just now.... to go to the ball.... and I know it is impossible.
Fairy Godmother:Impossible? Bah, what's a fairy godmother for?
Cinderella: To make my wish come true?
Fairy Godmother: If you wish it hard enough. Now let me see you'll need a coach, and four horses, and a coachman, and a groom.
Cinderella: Is it possible to get those things by wishing for them?
Fairy Godmother: Well, the sensible people of this world will say
(sung) Fol-de-rol and fiddle dee dee and fiddley faddley foddle all the wishes in the world are poppy cock and twoddle.
Cinderella: (spoken) Aren't they?
Fairy Godmother:Not always. The sensible people will also say (sung) Fol-de-rol and fiddle dee dee and fiddley faddley foodle all the dreamers in the world are dizzy in the noodle.
Cinderella: (spoken) And aren't they?
Fairy Godmother: Not always, especially when there is someone who loves you to help you. Now, to work. For a coach I believe I see a pumpkin over there-- that'll do very nicely.
Cinderella: A pumpkin?
Fairy Godmother: I see you have four pet mice in a cage.. they'll do very nicely for the horses
Cinderella: Mice? For horses?
Fairy Godmother: Mm hmm.. Now let me see, something's peering at us from under that shrub, oh yes, it's a fine fat rat with whiskers, and his brother they'll do very nicely for the coachman and the groom.
Cinderella: Oh, dear Fairy Godmother it all seems so impossible!!
. . . . .
Cinderella: (song) For the world is full of zanies and fools
who don't believe in sensible rules
and won't believe what sensible people say
Both: And because these daft and dewey eyed dopes
keep building up impossible hopes
Impossible things are happening every day.
-- from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella musical

 

p.s. The dream is to have a center to do implausible, impossible and desirous things with other dewey eyed dreamers; and plus also we can jointly host impossible things Salons in your city. Ping me, email or comment...

Art Credits: "Spring Festival" photo shoot by Steve Meisel via Honestly WTF blog; stained glass cat via The Paintshop Pro Users Group; rabbit detail from the Disney Cinderella castle mosaics done by controversial mosaic artisan via The Disney Blog; photo of Dr. Tae by Clayton Hauck for Chicago Reader; detail of Eric Nyquist's Ramsar Rights (I found Eric's works through the curated Gawker Artists gallery); more Steve Meisel.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. - Willa Cather

"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy, only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is." - Willa Cather

This week marks the seventh year of the Crossroads Dispatches blog. Specifically the big b-day will be this Sunday, February 6th. Beginning yesterday I've been doing a retrospective of the last seven year's worth of themes in my head (it's significantly been reinvented over and over the last seven years).

Then, I was thinking forward to the vision onward, and why you might care to spend your precious life--be it even five minutes of it--immersing yourself here on any given day.

I don't write to write as many authors do (if I did, I'd have written a book by now). I write for the potential of creative interaction, for feedback loops building off each other, for the mutual sounding board, for collaboration. It's a bit easier to do this online because of the inherent design and nature of the Internet than, say, a poetry chapbook.

This vision thing is going to evolve and develop over the course of the week. Currently, I think I'd like to delve into the theme of abundance. Abundance in the broadest conception of that word--even to the point of being about wholeness, and inclusivity.

So how does it relate to the opening quote and to truthfulness? It's a half-baked hunch. There'll be a point to this rambling surely by the blog birthday. It's just not fleshed out yet.

Yesterday, I thought to myself: "It's brave to admit to global audience you have $2.99 in your bank account." Admittedly, it's not that uncommon especially for bootstrapping entrepreneurs, or anyone taking risks. Yet, somehow instinctually I know it is a taboo to mention your bank account balance aloud, in public, in North America unless it's in upper strastopheres. It's even taboo in private one-on-one to anyone besides a close confidant.

Is this an act of bravery?

Or is it simply honest, truthful, transparent?

Is it sharing?

"Scarcity is the default mode for most of us. It's a hard habit to break, but almost always worth it. Scarcity involves hoarding, and abundance involves sharing." - Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Comformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World

Scarcity involves hoarding. Abundance involves sharing. Hmmmm.....

I sense I've been hoarding. I've been holding back the gems of my life from this blog. I've been holding back the coarse black coal as well. It's appears safer to stick to middle ground stuff. Mind my P's and Q's. You know, don't rock the boat.

 

My dream was once--and maybe it still is yet I'm also putting everything on the table for re-inspection--to be in a moai.

What's a moai? Without looking it up online, off the top of my head, to me it's having a clan that mutually supports each other emotionally, mentally, financially--in every realm, yet we don't reside together in a commune nor an ashram. In the financial sense, we'd pool money together to invest in each other's dreams to see them come into fruition. Sometimes it feels like a pretty naïve concept--especially in the West where everyone appears to prefer to be an island (nod to John Donne). (It's funny that moais developed on an island, and in the East.)

Interrelated, I was intrigued by this passage quoted below--specifically, the PLANTING SEEDS sentence. The vision of this blog I have going forward may have to do with planting seeds, letting life live and thrive. Not in the sense that I am planting seeds into your head (I've an aversion to persuasive writing as it feels controlling). Without further ado, here's the passage:

"If You Eat the Rich, You Will Soon Starve
Let's assume we take $1 billion away from the wealthy and redistribute it to the working poor, the below-middle class families struggling to make ends meet. This will result in each family getting, let's say, a hundred bucks. What will each family do with this windfall...

Will they rush to Wall Street to invest it in ways that create venture capital to launch new businesses and support new product invention, thus creating new jobs and exportable goods that help to balance trade?...

Will they run out and use it to buy investment real estate? Will they fund medical research or universities? They will not. [The author says it'll mostly goes to "necessity" purchases and to lowering debt.] It will not be planted as seeds to grow in ways that enhance the economy and its ability to provide jobs, better jobs, health care, or community development, nor will it be invested in ways that make a difference in the individual's family life. That is the cold, harsh reality."

[Here the author does an aside, although relevant to me as I've spend a good chunk of time living in post-Katrina New Orleans, and riffs on the corruption and waste of government funds allocated to the Gulf Coast for rebuilding. . .] "However, private investors from Donald Trump to countless individual entrepreneurs, and private individuals like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, have been getting things done and are having positive impact--with private money.

Taking money away from the rich accomplishes nothing positive for anybody. Leave those same billion dollars in the hands of the wealthy, and most will get invested, some will be put at risk, in ways that do create or expand businesses, fund medical research, hospitals, and universities, create jobs, create better jobs, and in countless ways, benefit everybody. Because the affluent already have their needs met, additional money placed in their hands tends to be, in large part, invested, in other part, spent on goods and services. Money passing through affluent hands is jet fuel for the economy." - No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent, by Dan Kennedy

I'm sure all of us have a point of view on the above passage and have our own list of pros and cons as well as truths and fallacies of these statements. For me, the intriguing part are the questions that arose, including these 3 questions:

1. What have I done with my money the last two years when I was living below poverty level. Did I plant seeds and "spread the wealth"? Did I primarily subsist, stay afloat in self-preservation survival mode as the author assumes?

2. What would I do with $100 now after having considered this? Anything different?

3. What if I gave away $100 to someone--perhaps someone reading this blog this minute? What if I gave YOU precisely $100? Would you use it to plant seeds? How?

Serendipitiously, yesterday I was skimming Chris Guillebeau's book, The Art of Non-Comformity at the bookstore, and he specifically talks about starting a business for $100 and cites a few solid examples.

When I got home, I went to Chris Gullebeau's website, and there's a new forum called, The $100 Business Forum (so actually it'll cost $200 to launch your project, as it's $100 to register).

So I'm curious in the interest of an experiment, let's call it (to be a little facetious) The Eat The Rich Experiment, how you'd use an extra $100? Recall, the above passage also includes "invested in ways that make a difference in the individual's family life," so don't feel constrained to start a business; there's many types of seeds. Share your answers below.

p.s. SoHo (New York City) is a pretty good example that sometimes broke, yet visionary and edgy artists do plant seeds that yield fruit; see The Warhol Economy by Elizabeth Currid. (Not that I'm necessarily advocating being a penniless bohemian. And not that I'm not. It's your life.)

p.p.s. I have $2.29 in my bank account, in the interest of radical financial transparency.

ART CREDITS: All 100% Annie Lapin's works from Light Puppet to Private Outdoor Facial Coronation to Bi-cyclic and Tri-cyclic Romantics.

"I would never live a better day." - Hendri Coetzee

Every serious accident I've ever had has involved water.

This isn't about "accidents", nor white-water kayaking (a sport I once partook in), nor rivers. This is about the downstream current of life. This is about death. This is about getting to the point where one fully trusts that gravitational pull in the black hole of your belly. This is about how I never surrendered to the divine, to that black hole, last year. Maybe once. Okay, maybe twice. Piss poor for an explorer, really.

I watered down every single idea I had last year to make it palatable to investors or voters (think Pepsi Refresh or Kickstarter) or potential clients. When the whole point in the first place was the first descent--an expedition that had never been attempted before, not pursuing the safe and sure. This is about how the real danger is resisting where the flow takes you. This is about being gutsy.

At least that's what I thought this post would be about.

I still don't know why, yet this story about Hendri Coetzee captured me when I read it on December 25, 2010. I figured I'd write a post soon after about adventure, risk, life, death. I haven't been able to do it justice.

I give up. It's just going to be a small tribute from what Hendri himself and a friend wrote of his life.

What comes next in the weeks and months ahead shall be infused with some of his spirit and joie de vivre.

Hendri Coetzee was kayaking in Africa with a few other world-class river runners on a private expedition. "He led the first source-to-sea exploration of the Nile River in 2004 and opened up many waterways for kayak travel throughout Africa." - MSNBC, 12/21/10

"It is hard to know the difference between irrational fear and instinct, but fortunate is he who can. Often there is no clear right or wrong option, only the safest one. And if safe was all I wanted, I would have stayed home in Jinja. Too often when trying something no one has ever done, there are only 3 likely outcome: Success, quitting, or serious injury and beyond." - Hendri Coetzee's last post on instinct and "feeling" one's way

I believed it'd be all icing on the cake after near death on December 26, 2004--and all my days ever more would feel like an "extra" extension. Yet it is easy to take life for granted and to settle into other people's rhythms even for someone that writes a post titled, If Not on the Day I Die, Then Not Today."

"The highest form of bliss is living with a certain degree of folly." - Erasmus

I originally read of Hendri's life, and his death on the Vagabonding blog. The entire post is worthwhile, and this excerpt of his friend's first meeting with Henri touched me:

"From the moment I met him, nearly ten years ago, I was awed by Hendri’s incredible physical courage coupled with his profound quest for truth and meaning in life. At the time I was working in a remote safari camp on the Tanzanian coast, living in a hut, with nothing but raw nature for a hundred miles in any direction. Hendri rolled up off the beach and introduced himself. He was sunburned and loaded down with survival gear—yet inconspicuous and nonchalant, as if on a leisurely Sunday stroll through the mall. He had trekked that wild stretch all the way from Kenya, braving every manner of life-risking obstacle (particularly the many hippo-, croc-, and shark-rich delta fordings) by himself. After I uncorked my nicest bottle of wine, we stayed up way past our bedtimes debating what was the most important invention in the past two thousand years (he suggested it was the rudder, I said printing press). In the morning we exchanged contact information, and just as nattily as he’d arrived he was on his way

As time bore on, that trope—a man taking on the wild African coast by himself—which blessed me at 22 years of age, proved a catalyst for change in my relationship with the world.
- "In Defense of Adventure: Some thoughts on the death of Hendri Coetzee", Vagabonding blog, Jonathan Yevin

One of the parts I loved about Peter Pan (I only read it for the first time in 2009) was a scene where Peter believes he may really die as tidal water rises around him. The boy huddles on a small knoll. Suddenly, the avid and daring adventurer in him brightens up at the prospect of a new adventure--he's never died before, he realizes.

Henri tries to answer that quintessential (and exasperating) question asked of every explorer, Why? about his expedition. (Explaining kills art, is my typical reply.)

Beautifully expressed:

"In a world filled with interpretations; truth exist in only in nature. There you cannot even lie to yourself. She does not tolerate bullshit. You come before Her with respect, fully present and ready to give a 100%, anything less and She will have your head.

Ultimately going on a journey that puts your life at risk is not a decision made by the mind. Reason does not support it. When Edmund Hillary was asked why he climbed mountains, he said “Because it is there.” I wonder if he knew he was talking about the need not the mountain.

My current view on the matter is that the issue of motivation is indeed beyond words or even petty needs. When we surrender to the unknown, faced with the magnitude of the powers that lies ahead, it forces the realization of how insignificant this body is compared to the forces that lie in our path. Someone recently pointed out to me that our greatest moments are the ones where we lose ourselves. Moments when we become not only more, but become everything.I have breathed in life in its purest form a few second here and there and all I want is more of it.

These moment by themselves are inadequate, they offer only brief respite. Grabbing onto them can be as destructive as any addiction. Their value lies in the glimpses they provide of what is possible. I have come to hope that perhaps the intensity and clarity of these experiences can be used for more than cheap thrills. There is more to this world than what we perceive and perhaps one day I can slip through the gap these experience briefly provide, to live permanently in that place of Boundlessness, also know as Happiness. Not the superficial ‘satisfaction of needs’ happiness, but the real thing. The happiness of Being one with the moment, no matter how it presents itself. Ultimate freedom." - "Because it is there," The Great White Explorer blog, by Hendri Coetze

Thank you, Hendri.

p.s. Crocodile symbol via BellaOnline.com: "[Although the crocodile signifies hidden danger, it can be transmuted into an ally.] If you can identify the emotions or situation that is lurking under the surface of your conscious mind, you can use that powerful energy as protection rather than experiencing it as a hidden danger. You can harness the energy and use it as a source of inspiration and creativity."

p.p.s. The blog headline is the very last sentence of the last post Henri wrote.

Bonus: Supposedly, my horoscope for 2011:

"The Strait of Gibraltar is the narrow passage between Europe and Africa where the Mediterranean Sea joins the Atlantic Ocean. According to legend, in ancient times the Latin phrase "ne plus ultra" was inscribed in the rock overlooking this gateway. It meant "not further beyond," and served as a warning to sailors not to venture out to the wild waters past the strait. Eventually, that cautionary advice became irrelevant, of course. With a sturdy vessel, skilled crew, good preparation, and expert knowledge based on the experience of others, venturing out past the "ne plus ultra" point wasn't dangerous. I hope you'll take that as your cue in 2011, Gemini. - freewillastrology.com for January 5th, 2011

At this point, I don't even care if venturing past the "ne plus ultra" signage is dangerous or not. The safe choice will surely kill me.

art credits: Scout of the Rusisi River, photo by Henri Coetzee from his The Great White Explorer blog; The Fool, from the Phoenix Tarot deck; 1810 postcard of the Rock of Gilbraltar issued by L.J. Stagnetto from Wikipedia

Michel de Montaigne, retreat to self-study for advancement, I AM a verb = I Know Nuthing

At age 21, Ryan Holiday became Director of Marketing at American Apparel, the largest clothing manufacturer in the United States, and he recently guest-blogged at Tim Ferriss' Four-Hour Work Week blog about one of his guiding mentors, Michel de Montaigne.

What impressed me was that Ryan clearly knows how contrarian his hero is in today's "I have the answer" expert/guru cult(ure) and boldly forged ahead with his praise. This is the tiniest sliver from the well worth reading post, The Experimental Life: An Introduction to Michel de Montaigne.

"In late 1569, Michel de Montaigne was given up as dead after being flung from a galloping horse.

As his friends carried his limp and bloodied body home, he watched life slip away from his physical self, not traumatically but almost flimsily, like some dancing spirit on the “tip of his lips,” and then return. This sublime experience marked the moment Montaigne began a uniquely playful relationship with his existence and was a sense clarity and euphoria about life that he carried with him from that point forwards. Shortly thereafter he took a bold step, retiring from a promising public career—retired to himself, so to speak—and made self-study his official occupation.

...

3) Que sais je? (Don’t take yourself too seriously)

You’d think that Montaigne, as he grew older and more practiced, would have become more certain, more sure of himself. In fact, the more he studied, the more frequently he found himself asking his most famous question: “Que sais je?” or “What do I know?” The answer to the rhetorical question is, “Nothing.” Montaigne practiced the Skeptic’s notion of questioning what he “knew” and deliberately threw his assumptions into doubt.

By building up tolerance to uncertainty, he not only better suited himself for life in chaotic civil war-era France but primed his mind for tackling the big questions that don’t have easy answers. For a second, consider of all our major public thinkers today. They do the opposite, constantly telling how sure they are of their beliefs and criticizing their “opponents” for changing their minds. Changing your mind is a good thing, Montaigne would say. It means you’ve resisted the impulse to think you’re infallible. He wrote that as part of his profession of getting to know himself he found such “boundless depths and variety that [his] apprenticeship bears no other fruit than to make me know much there remains to learn.” If only we could internalize that attitude—instead of feeling cocky when we learn something, acknowledge that it really just taught us how much more we need to learn." - Ryan Holiday

One of my guiding, but alas dead, mentors is Buckminster Fuller. He was prepared to drown himself and was standing on the brink of one of the Great Lakes (after the death of his daughter, followed by a business bankruptcy) when he realized that he didn't belong to himself, but was part and parcel of the Universe--and, instead of wading in, he vowed to participate fully in the universe. Right after that epiphany, he went through a silent period to purge everything thing he'd learned from others that he didn't know to be absolutely true; basically, questioning all second-hand knowledge and adopted beliefs that he'd assumed were his own.

His clearing period lasted about 2 years. (Some folks call it Bucky's "gestation period.")

"I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe." - Buckminster Fuller

 My spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, shares that one of the best things he did to get really clear was to keep a journal where he only wrote something down if it were true. (Interestingly, Steven Johnson mentioned the "commonplace book"--a journal--in Where Do Good Ideas Come From? and Montaigne kept one too.) He'd ask himself, What do I know for sure is true? He speaks of this journalling often, but this interview is the only instance I've found readily online where he talks of the value of self-inquiry and why writing it down the questions and answers worked for him. I particularly mention my teacher precisely because he's one of the clearest, shining people I've ever yet met (Miguel Ruiz and Byron Katie are two others, and you won't know the others as they're not online much); he charts into the Unknown moment by moment.

"The valuable part was not only what I found, but was really also that it showed me what I didn’t know, which is really valuable. It’s extraordinarily important. It’s kind of like a spring-cleaning, you know? You just dust out your consciousness–you go, “Wow, 99% of the things that I think I know, when I really examine them honestly…” You’re all of a sudden not so sure if it’s really true or not. And it’s really valuable to empty out the mind in that way, and to empty out the old belief system." - Adyashanti, "I'm Not Babysitting Your Ego," Buddhist Geeks interview

I've had the privilege (at first it didn't feel like a privilege, but more like a dot-bomb and divorce catastrophe) of having much more than 30 hours a week for past 9 years devoted to contemplation and self-study ala Montaigne, Bucky and Adya.

I happened to be looking for an attachment in an email on an  incubator/hunch hub idea I had back in 2007 (yes, the Pooh tea party illustration is the right mood for said hunch hub/ serendipity Salon) when I happened upon a long, lost (or so I thought) 46-page retreat program I'd designed for an intimate group of folks that usually attended the Daring to Live an Authentic Life weekly gatherings that my housemates and I hosted when I lived in San Jose, CA. I called the retreat an "Advance" and it was held in spring 2005--two months after I vowed to quest for "What is Deathless?" post-tsunami.

I was surprised reading it how much I focused on self-contemplation (I was much more brute-force goal-oriented back then). The hypothesis was all the answers to the new, never-ending questions you're asking are already being presented to you within and in your unfolding life.

Here are the first two pages of the section ETHOS OF AN ADVANCE for your pleasure:

“Maybe your next vacation should be a journey inward,” read this month’s Body + Soul magazine.

This is a journey without a distance. It is not horizontal, but vertical.

“Buddha is a scientist of the inner world. Meditation is his basic contribution – turning the horizontal consciousness into a vertical consciousness.” – Osho, "Buddha: His Life and Teachings"

If we could take a journey, make a pilgrimage together, without any intent or purpose, without seeking anything, perhaps on returning we might find that our hearts had unknowingly been changed. I think it worth trying. Any intent or purpose, any motive or goal, implies effort -- a conscious or unconscious endeavor to arrive, to achieve. I would like to suggest that we take a journey together in which none of these elements exist.

 

If we can take such a journey, and if we are alert enough to observe what lies along the way, perhaps when we return, as all pilgrims must, we shall find that there has been a change of heart; and I think this would be much more significant than inundating the mind with ideas, because ideas do not fundamentally change human beings at all. Beliefs, ideas, influences may cause the mind superficially to adjust itself to a pattern; but, if we can take the journey together without any purpose and simply observe as we go along the extraordinary width and depth and beauty of life, then out of this observation may come a love that is not merely social, environmental, a love in which there is not the giver and the taker, but which is a state of being, free of all demand.

 

This journey I am proposing that we take together, is not to the moon, or even to the stars. The distance to the stars is much less than the distance within ourselves. The discovery of ourselves is endless, and it requires constant inquiry, a perception which is total, an awareness in which there is no choice. This journey is really an opening of the door to the individual in relationship with the world. So, the understanding of ourselves is not to the end of individual salvation, it is not the means of attaining a private heaven, an ivory tower into which to retire with our own illusions, beliefs, gods. On the contrary, if we are able to understand ourselves, we shall be at peace, and then we shall know how to live rightly.  -J. Krishnamurti

THE INNER GURU

There are no gurus "out there", but simply people whom reflect and mirror our highest selves and/or our shadow selves. In the yogic sense, a guru merely mirrors your innate but unawakened potential back to you.

Look within for answers. But note your blind spots in the mirrors (i.e. "other people") surrounding you.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“Not I - not anyone else, can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.” - Walt Whitman

 

“You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself.” - Galileo

This story is very illustrative of our own capacities when we are still and listen. In fact, it’s illustrative of the ethos of the Advance. You may come in feeling thoroughly lost as well:

“You may remember A.A. Milne’s story about Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, and Rabbit getting lost in the Hundred Acre Wood. Under Rabbit’s bossy, officious guidance, the three go around and around until they’re thoroughly lost and terrified of lurking Heffalumps. Eventually, a disgusted Rabbit leaves Pooh and Piglet and goes to find the way home. He never returns. After a while, Pooh turns to Piglet:

 

“Come on, Piglet. Let’s go home.”

 

“But we’re lost,” said Piglet.

 

“Yes,” said Pooh, “but there are twelve pots of honey in my cupboard at home, and they are calling to my tummy. I couldn’t hear them before, because Rabbit would talk.”

 

This is what happens to someone who settles into the threshold of Square One [Square One's similar to what Joseph Campbell calls the ‘Initiation’], stops fighting the process, and accepts the strange formlessness of the situation. The chattering, Rabbit-like social self gets so frustrated and disoriented that it finally wanders away. Then something else comes through: a silent sweetness that resonates deep in your essential self, your pots of honey calling to your tummy.” – Martha Beck, Finding Your Own North Star

WHAT TO EXPECT

 

Nothing.

“I don’t know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colors I am going to use.” – Pablo Picasso

Everything happens after the Advance. And even then, expect nothing for optimal results.

Okay, okay. You can expect clarity, insights, and a desire to commit and focus – but the what’s and how’s are not known yet. Don’t worry about them now.

art credits: Just Walk Away by Dasha Denger; journal page Will I Ever Find An Answer? by Hannah of Spans Stitches blog (p.s. yes + yet more infuriating questions galore after that one--enjoy the unfurling infinite mystery!); A.A. Milne illustration via Mystery of Existence (how apropos!) blog; last photo of journaler via She Knows blog.