Pangea Day - A Cross-Cultural Celebration

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"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."  Albert Einstein

Gail_longhair.jpgI forwarded part of a email about Pangea Day to a friend...

...Take a look at these films. They are each just one minute long. They feature a choir in one country singing another country's national anthem: a simple idea that packs surprising emotional power.
 France sings for USA

Kenya sings for India
Japan sings for Turkey

They were shot by film directors looking to support the landmark TED project Pangea Day....

After reading the email and listening to the singing, my friend wrote back:

"OK, you've got my attention - the idea is absolutely amazing (something about the simplest things)"

In deed! Pangea Day will be a remarkable day because people all over the world will come together, physically in communities, and virtually around the world, to celebrate together what is working.  As of last count there were more than 1000 communities organizing events to gather the local energies, hearts and spirits to watch and sing and be inspired enough to continue the dialogs well past May 10, 2008. 

The idea is simple really. Create a large vision. Share it. Create a self-organizing ecosystem of doers and like-minded people. Inspire networks to pass the word and create more self-organizing events.  Many years ago we had simple market places where good ideas fermented and took root:

"In the market, language grew. Became bolder, more sophisticated. Leaped and sparked from mind to mind. Incited by curiosity and rapt attention, it took astounding risks that none had ever dared to contemplate, built whole civilizations from the ground up." The Cluetrain Manifesto, 2000

Today we have a global marketplace called the Internet. It is a remarkable tool.

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Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

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"Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the...universe."  R. Buckminister Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969

Gail_longhair.jpgI met Matt in 1976. He had created Renascence Library and was teaching a course called Redesigning the Future. It was there that I was introduced to Buckminister Fuller by reading his book, Intuition.  Matt had a long list of books, more than 500 that he believed necessary to read and understand if one was to successfully navigate the future and thrive well into the 21st Century.  His course brought the contents of these books alive and always he gave credit and recognition to the authors and their bodies of knowledge.  Some of the books explored ancient histories and others forecast futures.  The list recognized every field and every religion. Some were fiction, others non-fiction.

While my field was education, I had come to know that as a teacher, I should be reading a vast variety of books outside of my field.  Through the Learning Exchange, I was introducing teachers and children to a world of ideas and linking these ideas to their work, showing how ideas build upon each other.  Nothing came from nothing, but rather through the assimilation of a collection of thoughts and ideas perturbing our minds and catalyzing new ideas... perhaps higher order ideas.  I take much joy in this reality.

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Spark Card: Finding New Search Images

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We are prepared to see, and we see easily, things for which our language and culture hand us ready-made labels. When those labels are lacking, even though the phenomena may be all around us, we may quite easily fail to see them at all. The perceptual attractors that we each possess are the filters through which we scan and sort reality, and thereby they determine what we perceive on high and low levels. - Douglas Hofstadter
todd_0755.jpgHofstadter's 'perceptual attractors' are what we call search images. These images are the perceptual cues we look for to identify and assess the systems that make up our world. Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, Chapter 4: Assembling Complexity, provides a great example by telling the story of what ecologist Steve Packard learned over numerous attempts to grow a prairie from scratch. He has some of the necessary search images going into his exploration, but they proved insufficient:

... He felt yet another ingredient must be missing which prevented a living system from snapping together. He started reading the botanical history of the area and studying the oddball species...

"What the heck is this?" he'd asked the botanist. "It's not in the books, it's not listed in the state catalogue of species. What is it?" The botanist had said, "I don't know. It could be a savanna blazing star, but there aren't any savannas here, so it couldn't be that. Don't know what is." What one is not looking for, one does not see.

... An epiphany of sorts overtook Packard when he watched the piles of his seed accumulate in his garage. The prairie seed mix was dry and fluffy-like grass seed. The emerging savanna seed collection, on the other hand, was "multicolored handfuls of lumpy, oozy, glop," ripe with pulpy seeds and dried fruits. Not by wind, but by animals and birds did these seeds disperse. The thing -- the system of coevolved, interlocking organisms -- he was seeking to restore was not a mere prairie, but a prairie with trees: a savanna... once Packard got a "search image" of the savanna in his mind, he began to see evidence of it everywhere.

What search images are you using to identify the key ingredients and instructions for assembling the project or venture you're working on?

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