A Calm Sea Never Made A Great Sailor

There are few things I enjoy more at the end of the day than a glass of wine and penning a good sentence. So too there are few things that bring a greater fear to my heart. This struggle, this challenge, this urge to create is accompanied close within by a familiar of utter fright. I find I am haunted by the limitations of my ability. Over the years this has led me far from pursuing what I love. It's not so much that I dread others viewing my work or worry about the criticisms or ennui that I may induce. It's my own dance I'm doing and the demon band plays a tune I've scored myself.

I had forgotten the first lesson of true artistry. That is, once you start you have little control and the piece takes you where it will. I've been researching the world lately, traveling and asking questions, - listening closely to the finest thinkers I can find, reading their works, pondering their message. I was looking for my translation of the current socio-economic situation and treading water while attempting to compose a magnus opus addressing what I have found. In truth though, I've come to believe that there is no narrative, at the moment, capable of capturing the subtle twists rippling through our culture. The situation we find ourselves in has a unique cast in the pall of current history. Yet in my soul I know something is shifting, some rough beast, whose hour has come round at last, now slouches towards Bethlehem. This I feel deep within.

To me, it is a strident call. These times demand more from us. It is the perihelion of a cycle that melts the wax and exposes us to to the harsh rule of gravity. I believe now we can no longer sit aside and make casual observations, it's time to turn towards true commitment.

I know I'm leading you on a strange path - forgive me, I'm reaching for feeling more than words and my lexical skills will not readily map to my study of the mountain passes. I ran a race this past weekend with a dear friend and she kindly let me entertain her with stories from my youth to preoccupy us as we trudged along, the first serious run of the season. I was telling her about a time when I was military and they taught us how to run and fight. I remember a key part of my training back then was counter intuitive to mine, and most people's nature. We were strenuously conditioned to move towards gunfire, towards explosions, instantaneously, with little thought and no hesitation.

This was a lesson they learned the hard way in past wars. In general, you would be moving along on a patrol and if it was not your lucky day you might walk into an ambush consisting of non friendly types firing at you from multiple directions. At this point most freeze and duck for cover, if so, then your odds of survival are very slim, particularly if they know what they're doing when they set up the ambush. The guys who trained us (mind you some of them had left pieces behind in the jungles of Southeast Asia) figured out the the proper technique for minimizing your losses in this kind of situation. You immediately turn and move into the firing line, ideally back the way you came or forward depending on the terrain, fast and hard, pouring everything you have into the breach and hoping to god that you break through and come out behind the ambush - then it gets tricky for the other guy. You may realize that this doesn't often work well for either side but the only other option is to sit there and be decimated. Not a game I like to play.

I use this now as a metaphor for the times we're in. We've been ambushed in a way, not by any enemy but by ourselves. We've been lulled these past years into believing many things that were not quite true or that were obvious in their malignant nature yet passing or suspending judgment when the right answer was to rise above the seduction of the market and foment fundamental changes. Accepting and absolving when we should have been more strident in our demands that our culture match the spiritual grace we know we deserve. Now we pay the price.

So the answer I have is to turn into the fire, moving swiftly towards the unknown, striking out and hoping to break through and achieve some grasp of the situation. My goal is to gain access to a point of communication and use it as a tool to put information out that will effectively support the coming changes our culture is beginning to witness. Find mechanisms that allow me to present what I am coming to understand as necessary in a society that is rapidly decompressing and undergoing fundamental transformation. There's an old adage that I've tongued for years - "Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel".

Makes sense to me - so much so that I've started a small company bent on moving into the publishing business in this high tech, new world order. We're going to put out a magazine, mobile in nature, designed to be read on your cell phone and other types of smaller devices. I say magazine because that's the closest word I can think of to describe what I want to produce but it really doesn't do the media potential justice.

I have a strong track record of creating products and projects but always strictly in the technology field and backed up by market analysts and preppies sporting MBAs like tennis rackets. Here, my heart leads for the first time and the product, while inclusive of cutting edge technology, is really about creative content. These are days that require people with voices to speak up and make assertions and calls for actions that move us in the right direction. Hopefully I will discover and bring to a greater audience those whose thoughts and spirit might guide us a bit more consciously. That's the role I'm trusting to sign on to as a publisher. And as far as moving into the fire, this is probably one of the scariest places to be at the moment, trying to establish a new endeavor in the media industry.

Rest assured, I'm well trained.

My World And Welcome To It

I went to a party last night, a very nice benefit held for a friend heading to South Africa to work in an aids orphanage. I truly admire her courage, and her faith in the world and herself to affect change. Anyway I was socializing and, geek that I am, proselytizing about the newest technologies that were out there for people to play with. Our host, who is a therapist, stopped me and asked if I could help him with designing a website where he could offer up a video of himself for clients to view. That's easy, I said, we could knock that out in a day, but it got me to thinking about a conversation we might have...

"So what if you wanted it to be interactive, you know, have people ask you questions and you answer them."

"That's a little more interesting though I don't know if people would actually enjoy it much less utilize something like that. It's really just the telephone with faces at that point. "

"Well what kind of therapy would work over the internet"

" I don't know, certainly not traditional therapy, a lot of that is about the interaction between the therapist and the client. There are a lot of subtle cues that would be lost over such a limited medium."

"Well what about none traditional therapies. I have a friend who's been working on getting her degree in Dance Therapy from Lesley and other friends in the past who've worked in the field of Art Therapy. These are approaches I've always thought had a lot of potential because they bring in the creative aspects of the mind as a tool towards finding answers to issues that we all have."

"Perhaps, but isn't the internet rather limited? How do you dance on a computer?

"Sure, dancing may be out but there are areas of intense creativity being generated on the internet. Have you ever heard of Second Life?"

"I've heard of it, isn't it a game where people go to meet other people."

"It's actually a virtual world where you recreate yourself through the embodiment of an Avatar".

"An Avatar?"

"Yes, a totally fictional representation of yourself as you wish to appear. You could be a man or a woman or even a child. In fact you don't even need to be human. You could have six legs, a monkey tail and the head of an alligator if that's the way you want to see yourself."

"You mean I can change my avatar to reflect what I'm feeling inside?"

"Indeed, and you can have conversations within the virtual world in this form with your therapist or even amongst your therapy group, who by the way all have their own unique avatars. An added benefit is that you can travel in these worlds, even fly, to make believe places so the therapist could conceivably introduce different actions and more sophisticated venues to reach into and explore the psyche."

"So this is Avatar Therapy."

"Yes and it does exist today in limited fashion. People use it to overcome fears such as flying or spiders. It's really up to the therapeutic community to take this and run with it. "

"There's an old saying, "The sky's the limit" - here, I guess, the only limitation is our own imagination"

Get Your Groove On

Been getting the urge to go dancing lately. I love to dance and if the music's right and the crowd's amenable I'll go all night. Coincidently, I've been reading Lewis Mumford's "Technics and Human Development" and I'm at a part where's he's conjecturing about what human gatherings were like in our early days before we had language capabilities. He believes that it was gestures and actions that helped our ancestors form nascent social organizations. Someone would get inspired and begin a sort of "Look at Me" dance; this was the start of us getting together and telling stories. Before language it was just our bodies moving and jumping around, arms flailing and feet stamping, pantomiming animals and acts of nature. This dance in turn became infectious and the whole group would pick it up, reinforcing emotions and bonding the tribe together.

In a past life I was a dancer - no, not that kind of dancing. Modern dance - Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, et al. I wasn't really all that good at it, they kept me around mostly because I could lift women and not trip over my own feet. I loved training with a dance troupe though. We would spend hours in intricate choreography, flowing and swaying in complex patterns across the floor. It got so you were acutely aware of everyone at any given moment in space, mostly so you wouldn't run into them as you sped past but interestingly it also seemed as if our bodies were merged in some fashion into one transcendent being - not all the time but often enough to keep us in awe. Mind you this was back when I had a dancer's frame, 15 years of inhaling corporate fumes has left me sadly in ill repair, it's only recently through yoga that I've found my own true inner body returning - hence the desire to shake some booty.

There are a couple of applications out there that I've been playing with lately, facebook and twitter and they remind me of dancing in some fashion. These are what are called social apps because they're all about people interacting with each other on the internet. They let us keep in touch through short little text messages that are updated frequently. These short sentences usually reflect a person's mood or tell of an action being taken, what they've just eaten or who their new friends are. I'm fascinated by this. It strikes me that perhaps these are our early days of information dancing. The dawn of digital tribal movements saying "Look at Me". Small pieces of our separate lives are being blended together to be watched on a web page. Where will this go? I'm curious, what happens as we intertwine our lives closer and closer albeit today only through the limited medium of writing but tomorrow? As we become more aware of each other is this a dance that leads us to feel more connected while speeding temporally by? Are we on the road, like my young dance troupe, where some day we bond momentarily as one and as dervishes whirl together in collective meditation fully aware of what each other is feeling and doing?