here's a wonderful story about the need for perseverance and faith

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/science/19profile.html?_r=2&hpw%22

My brother Geoff sent me this story from the New York Times. I won't give away the preciousness of the story so you'll just have to open up the link and read it yourself. 

What the story reminds me of, and especially today, is that we are each called to discover the beauty of this world in our own way and to share that gift with the world through wonderfully different and creative ways.

Enjoy!

Jane

Meeting on Sunday, April 17th

Hi everyone,
Let's meet again at our house (Don and Jane) for Spaghetti Sunday.  Please come prepared to talk about your project idea (if you've already started, then an update on progress).  We spend time listening to each other, asking thoughful questions, and seeing what emerges from our dialogic process for next steps.

I'll make spaghetti. What will you bring? :-)
See you soon, Jane

Our Evolving Mission

Spaghetti Sunday had a bit of a lull due to the end of one academic quarter and the beginning of another, but the time off bore fruits of reflection and the generation of new ideas. Tonight was another evening in which we tried to articulate what we want to do through this group, and why we're gathering together. It's true that we want to support localized ideas, and help each other manifest our own ideas, but we also want to encourage the wider community to do the same.

Tonight's (unplanned) focus was on the benefits of technology. We watched a video that beautifully represents the connections that the internet allows us; the composer Eric Whitacre created a volunteer-based "virtual choir." Nearly 200 people volunteered, studied his instructional and conducting videos, and painstakingly video-recorded themselves singing their voice part to one of Whitacre's compositions. The videos were then spliced together into a virtual performance of the ethereal and beautiful "Lux Arumque." Whitacre's March 2011 TED Talks presentation on the Lux project is available here (apologies, I couldn't embed the video) and this is the full video of the virtual choir:

 

Furthermore, he launched a "Virtual Choir 2.0" for a composition entitled "Sleep;" it has received over 2,000 volunteer videos, and the compiled track will be released this month. The work is beautiful.

Aside from my personal affection for Whitacre's compositions (which I sang in high school), and notwithstanding his blonde rock-star hair-do, what moved us about this video is how freely committed and deeply connected people all over the world become when something speaks to their hearts, and when they are empowered to contribute their best effort. As the choir members explained on the project's Facebook page, they developed genuine and deep connections to the material and to the community even though they'd never actually met most of the people in that community. The amount of freely-given work that went into the virtual choir speaks to the power of connection -- even virtual connection -- and the potential for transformation that those connections & communities hold.

Jane's feeling is that today's younger generation has ideas, energy, and unrealized potential, while the older generation has wisdom, experience, and well-developed networks of resources; the best & fastest way to change this very damaged world is to bring those generations together. The idea, and the broader concept that we hope to spin off of our group, is to connect those two groups -- those two bodies of potential -- that they may bring possibilities to life, and benefit the world. It would be a virtual place to ask, and to answer, questions such as what do you need to realize your potential? What is your project, or your vision? What does your vision need?

More ideas developed during this discussion:

• We want to exercise this blog as an open space to share ideas, videos, projects, and networking resources -- and not just us, but any readers who want to join in as well.
• We talked about the power of social networking in leading to change; e.g. Facebook has proven to be a powerful tool in places like Egypt. 
• Rather than reinventing the social networking wheel, we'll investigate whether sites like Idealist.org have a mentor/mentee social networking component (and there are many other sites out there -- see below). 
• Haley's concept was to empower groups, including high school students and academics, to generate community-based, qualitative and respectable research that can be used as data to promote sustainable policies and advocacy. 
• Eddie explained the mentor/mentee networking concept as a type of micro-lending -- the micro-lending of social capital (wisdom, contacts, resources, expertise) instead of financial capital. 

Our hope is that each project fostered through such a program would lend its own tone, it's own take and approach and cause, to the overall cultural shift that we feel has to happen -- a voice in the choir, if you will.


* * * * *

Here are a few links to interesting & related material. The more I search the web, the more obvious it becomes that we are not the first people to deeply seek these connections. I find that reassuring!


On rallying the web-connected masses: The Coalition of the Willing, a web-based movement, proposes an open-source approach to solving the problem of climate change (co-opting the mission of the Open Sustainability Network). The COTW video kind of rocks my world. Even the way the film was made speaks to our thought processes; it was created in sections by 24 artists all over the world. Collaboration encouraging collaboration. This film makes me want to go kick down walls and plant trees and basically save the entire planet. Right now. Full-screen it & watch:



TED Talks: Eric Whitacre: A Choir 2,000 Voices Strong (apologies, but I can't embed the video)

Idealist.org: a community which seeks "a world in which every person who wants to help another has the ability to do so, and no opportunities for action or collaboration are missed or wasted."

Appropedia.org: an open-source wiki seeking to "provide the living resource library of individuals and organizations working towards a sustainable, healthier future, so that efforts can be spent evolving instead of duplicating past efforts."