blog (May, 2007)
treading watts, milling about
A culture that invents escalators and stairmasters is a culture that needs to assess what it's actually talking about. [...]
And that's fine to have projects: to lose weight or to exercise; if you like it, do it. But to actually go to a hall of mirrors -- in the middle of an energy crisis, -- to have all the healthy people in the culture go to a hall of mirrors and run on an actual metaphor for effort going nowhere, and then plug that thing in so it's an electric treadmill that actually draws power! -- that is a culture that needs to step back and look at itself.
[...]
If you look at a testimony of love from two thousand years ago it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago was ridiculous. How does that happen? [...] I don't put science really as the way I get to any of my answers. It's just helpful. It's poetry that I look to -- it's the clatter of recognition. You know it's fine -- everybody has different ways, but I attest that poetry works pretty well. It's... it's got a good heart.
-- Jennifer Michael Hecht, interview on Point of Inquiry
Point of Inquiry is the podcast from the Center for Inquiry, (A Global Federation Committed to Science, Reason, Free Inquiry, Secularism, and Planetary Ethics.) I had found their anti-religion slant overly religious, but I gave the podcast another try at Ilya's recommendation of this episode.
mind the communication gap
People never communicate completely
Receiver must always jump a gap.
Experts jump larger gaps
Novices - smaller gaps.Target the gap for the game, the people.
Aim for "sufficient" communication,
"small-enough" gap.-- Alistair Cockburn, Software Development as a Cooperative Game
then big and brilliant
I'm battling just to keep up in the ballet class I began last week. Thrown to the wolves is essential for learning, though, and helps teach more than just the skill at hand.
I'm overly self-conscious, and shrink when doing something at which I'm inept. I tighten into a little ball (physically and meta-) and chant disappearance incantations.
Don't want to show it until I've got it...
But teacher wouldn't have it.
Be big, she directed me:
Be big and bad,
then big and better,
then big and brilliant.
Why rehearse shyness while waiting on precision?
It's something I know about and have writ-intended before, but reminders with different twists keep trickling in. Jenita suggests: be generous (the performance isn't for or about you.) Hope@SAFMOD harps on practicing to perform (because you'll perform the way you've practiced.) Paul Buchheit recently wrote: "Perfect" is the enemy of "good enough" (and "Good enough" is the enemy of "At all"!)
You have length in those arms, she said.
Use it.
Make me jealous of it.
steps forward and backward
During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of nongrowth.
-- M. King Hubbert, "Exponential Growth as a Transient Phenomenon in Human History", 1976. (found at Hubbert peak theory on Wikipedia)
I think we will discover (probably painfully) that globalism was a set of transient economic relations made possible by a half century of cheap oil and relative peace between the great powers, and that enterprises that rely on these transient mechanisms -- such Wal-Mart, with its 12,000-mile merchandise supply chain to China, and its "warehouse on wheels" of tractor-trailor trucks circulating incessantly on America's interstate highways -- will be on their knees in a few years as we enter the export crisis phase of post-peak terminal oil depletion and the great powers of the world act with increasing desperation to compete over the remaining supplies.
-- Jim Kunstler, Blowing Green Smoke (Clusterfuck Nation)
participation is passport to effective non-profits
Alex Steffen of WorldChanging suggests that a more personal and empowering kind of participation is becoming the key to maintaining healthy non-profits:
[...] I think that more and more, non-profits are going to be in the business of not so much maintaining memberships, which is what they have done up until now, where basically it's a series of one-to-many communication where you basically send people various form letters and ask them to give you money and to support what you are doing in other ways. I think that is on its way out.
I'm sure they will continue to exist for quite some time, but I think that non-profits that are going to be really effective in the coming decade are going to be the ones that create at least a sense of many-to-many communications, where people feel that they are not just a member, they are a participant [emphasis mine]; where there is lots of communication happening from people in all sorts of positions in the organization, and that there starts to be this blurring of the line, [...]
-- Alex Steffen, Sharing Solutions: An Interview with Alex Steffen of WorldChanging (NetSquared)
I read this and was reminded of Passport Project, a near-and-dear Cleveland non-profit whose maxim is: building community through the arts.
Passport Project is one of the reasons I'm still in Cleveland. I found their Global Community Arts Center (E. 128th and Buckeye) shortly after moving back here ~3 years ago, and began learning Capoeira there. Then some modern dance classes, jazz concerts by excellent (but little-known) musicians, workshops..., and before I knew it I was helping paint the side of the Center, going out with Chloë and Ben, hanging artwork before a party, performing in demos at the Walk & Roll, House of Blues, Parade the Circle...
Chloë and Ben do a great job of blurring those lines of participation. They take sincere interest in those who come share, and infect all with healthy laughter, openness, confidence, and Chloë's mantra of 100% Love. The students become the performers, participants grow into community, and all are invited to the party -- family.
Passport Project has a blog now. A community blog -- everyone can post.