Technology is bringing the youth of Detroit and Palestine together in conversation. Young media makers in Palestine and youth from communities of color in Michigan engaged in parallel workshops that introduced digital stories, music videos and murals. A recent videoconference held during the Allied Media Conference in Detroit linked the two groups of young people and allowed them to share stories about their lives, how they feel about how they as a group are perceived, and the daily struggles
Monthly Archives: June 2008
Paradox and Confusion
By Shae Hadden | Bio
Someone was telling me recently that some of Buddhist temples in Japan are guarded by two fierce-looking demon-like figures. These guardians of ‘Truth’ are known as ‘Paradox’ and ‘Confusion’. These days, paradox and confusion seem to be states I alternate between in my quest to discover who I am and what future I want to create. If I’m not confused, then I’m trying to embrace something that defies intuition. My ‘truth’ seems elusive.I’ve been contemplating different possible futures for myself, visualizing myself in different situations, doing different things, and being with different people. Casting aside all of my limiting beliefs and patterns, I’m coming up with a wild assortment of possibilities to choose from. And I’m totally confused. It’s almost as disheartening as trying on different bathing suits at the store (another instance where I get confused). Except that in my imaginings of the
Fighting for the Future
Worth watching is an 8-minute videotape of Severn Suzuki’s speech at the 1992 World Summit in Rio. Daughter of renowned environmental scientist and author Dr. David Suzuki, a 13-year-old Severn spoke on behalf of the Environmental Children’s Organization (ECO) and silenced the world’s leaders with her message. What have we done and what will we do to respond to her call for responsible action?
Learning from the Internet Generation
By Jim Selman | Bio
My daughter wrote a blog yesterday (A World of Performance) about how technology can move us further and further away from human-to-human connections. I thought “Wow, I would never have thought about that at her age”. Her reflections about what is happening to us as human beings were insightful, but also very useful to me. I have been promoting use of technology to connect people and never imagined
A World of Performance
By Lauren Selman | Bio
This
past weekend, I was hiking with a couple of co-workers of mine in the
beautiful Grand Canyon National Park. As we were walking, one woman
posed the question, "Is our society changing or is it our awareness
making it look worse?" I didn’t understand what she meant at first, but
as we continued to talk, she was speaking to the concept of perception.
For example, people have been making ‘at home ‘drugs for
The World We Want: It Begins with a Conversation
By David Korten | Great Turning website
Read more posts in The World We Want series.
How does it happen? It starts with a conversation. A while back, Cecile Andrews, our local Seattle author of The Circle of Simplicity, explained to me how the women’s movement changed the story on gender and unleashed the long suppressed power
What Conversation Are You?
By Jim Selman | Bio
As many of you know, I view aging, and the rest of life for that matter, as a series of conversations. In my work, I try to show people that if we can observe ourselves and our world through the lens of language, we can see that everything we think and experience occurs in the context of some interpretation or another. For most people most of the time, our interpretation is that there is a ‘real world’ out there, and if we could only understand it and control it (and ourselves),
Unreasonable
I spent a good chunk of my life learning to be reasonable. In business, the mantra for any proposal was always: “Is it practical?” It seemed to me that reasonableness (and its sister practicality) were virtues. People who were unreasonable or impractical seemed to be exceptions—they came across as flaky, dangerous, occasionally lucky, unpredictable, disconnected, loose canons and, above all, they weren’t team players. When I turned 50, I came upon a quotation by George Bernard Shaw
Nature and the Human Soul
Bill Plotkin’s latest book, Nature and the Human Soul, offers a
model for human development rooted in the natural world. Calling on the
stories of elders Thomas Berry and Joanna Macy, Plotkin
evokes a strong sense of a lack of maturity in a culture dominated by
adolescent desires and habits.
In this book, this pyschologist, ecotherapist and wilderness guide defines eight stages of life–Innocent, Explorer, Thespian, Wanderer, Soul Apprentice, Artisan, Master and Sage. Plotkin leads the
The World We Want: The Power of Authentic Stories
By David Korten | Great Turning website
Read more posts in The World We Want series.
Profound social change takes place when an important cultural story changes—and the impetus to challenge imperial rule rarely comes from within the institutions of Empire. Democracy took hold when we replaced the story of the divine right of kings with the story that the powers of government derive from the will of the people. People of color and women won recognition of their full human rights only as the civil