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An
Invitation...
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| Imagine
a kitchen table, round. Pots of coffee and tea and hot chocolate sit steaming
on the table next to some big mugs. You stand at the doorway, looking in.
Someone rises from the table, smiles and beckons to you. You can smell cinammon
buns baking in the oven, and the chairs look comfortable. Will you enter? Accept the invitation to stay awhile? If so, a conversation can begin, or continue. You can pick up the threads that are weaving a new cultural fabric, adding in your own, developing the pattern further. Or perhaps you'll just sit quietly for now, noticing how the pattern forms and changes, how the contrasts add complexity and depth. If you decide to join in, here are some threads you might pick up: - Share! your reactions and comments about The Cultural Creatives. - Share! your own story about becoming a Cultural Creative. Toward the end of Crow and Weasel, Barry Lopez's fable about a quest to a new land, the wise old Badger describes the power of life stories. Telling true stories of where you've been and what you've seen is the way that people care for each other, she explains. Cultural Creatives need this kind of caring now. Making their way towards a new territory of values and a new way of living, they need to hear true stories of others who are also making this journey. It can be bread for the journey. Indeed, as Badger says, "sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive." - The new ideas, solutions, social inventions that you and your friends are developing; or that you're thinking about; or that you have seen and been inspired by in your neighborhood or workplace. Share your ideas or inventions! In this era, our biggest challenges are to preserve and sustain life on the planet and find a way past the overwhelming spiritual and psychological emptiness of modern life. Cultural Creatives are responding to these challenges with solutions directed toward healing and integration. Here's one example we learned of recently. Andrew Getz and Soren Gordhamer have created what they call "The Lineage Project" in New York and California. For the past two years, they have been introducing mindfulness practices like meditation, yoga, and council discussions to one of the most neglected groups in our country: young people in detention centers and juvenile halls. Why should this help violent kids? Because anything that can help these kids deal with their high levels of pain and arousal and lack of focus, any way that can help them to manage their emotions other than leaving their bodies or taking it out on somebody else, is bound to be useful. And there's something more. As Professor James Garbarino puts it, "Only the person who is not fully alive, who is dead inside, can commit acts of violence. For anyone who loves life and is spiritually fulfilled, such acts are incomprehensible to them." To address violent behavior directly in terms of spiritual emptiness may be a way of disarming violence at its root. This, it seems to us, is a way of creating new alternatives to one of our society's most dismal problems. The results so far suggest that when the staff is supportive, 90% of the kids thrive on programs like this. It is a beginning. Perhaps you know of other beginnings, promising new programs or inventions that are turning around what looked like intractable social problems. Or films, books, theatre pieces, music that points the way to a deeper understanding of what's important now. If so, we'd love to hear from you. - Share! your burning questions. How does something really new get started? Doesn't it always come from some kind of openness, a longing to make sense of something that doesn't make sense yet? There's a fertile darkness, the poets say, that lies beneath the masks of certainty and the stale old answers that no longer work. It's from this place of not knowing that the most penetrating questions come, the ones we desperately need now in this era of massive changes. Something has to slice through the old frames of reference so we can see our way to a new clarity. That was Martin Luther King Jr.'s brilliance and Rachel Carson's and Betty Friedan's - challenging the assumptions of the stale old social codes, pulling off the distorting lenses that nobody has noticed for the longest time. Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins raise these kind of questions in Natural Capitalism and Karl-Henrik Robert raised them in his international educational movement, The Natural Step. Sometimes questions are like that - burning laser beams of intensity that cut through to the core of the problem. And sometimes questions are just pesky mosquitoes that won't go away. This morning we talked with a reporter who had been working on an article on straw bale houses for a whole year. "Each time I talked to someone who was building one of these houses, I'd ask myself, 'What's the key to this? Why are they going to all this trouble?'" Then last week she read an article about the Cultural Creatives in the newspaper. "I suddenly found the string that led to all those disconnected pieces of information. Why are all these people spending all this time and money to build a house that is good for the earth? Because it's part of a whole pattern of their values and worldview and a way of life. The appearance of the Cultural Creatives gives me a whole new context to understand what I'm seeing. It all goes together," she told us, "and there's a tremendous energy behind it." The pesky question, she said, had finally found an answer. So whether your questions are brilliant or just pesky, if they are about creating a new culture and/or the personal issues that go with that, please think carefully about what we can all create together, and add them to the discussion. |
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