6 posts tagged “superstruct”
We love our toilet. We always deep-down, wanted it to be ceramic, shiny, super-clean feeling/looking. But once we got tuned (back) into our local watershed, we just knew it didn't make sense to be flushing drinking water down the privy.
And don't get me wrong; I LOVED LOVED LOVED it when we finally broke through on the eco-porta pottie front (so weird to be using chemical loos at the Big Green!!). But really, we wanted home toilets like the ones at the Bronx Zoo, and we trumpeted that human creativity/fun/play/ phenomenal breakthrough. Now that the Bronx Zoo toilet is building code standard, we all know how deeply satisfying it is to have that aesthetically pleasing receptacle at the top-end and a really fine process for shoveling shit at the other (all in the fullness of time).
It took us such a long time to get the toilets right. We used to just flush millions of gallons of drinking water down the drain... And all the while there were whispers that the next wars would be not over oil, but over water..; ominous murmerings which (thank goodness) gave us a start; A Start...!: Phew; we started to realize all the big under-our-noses things about the water.... and Ancient Future started to roll.
It's about the water It's about the water It's about the water: "Basins of Relations" means "We're all in this (watershed) together!!"*:thank you Brock!!
To my mind it took a man who could dance; a Burning Man man, a man who knew how to play, really, and how to laugh, and how to plant and nurture and grow... Just like the medicine of hummingbird is JOY, which is one of the most powerful medicine's I know in the face of DIRE.
WE WERE IN THE FACE OF DIRE... that much we knew.
It's about the water It's about the water It's about the water
"Basins of Relations"* means "We're all in this (watershed) together!!"
*Basins of Relations: A Citizens Guide to Protecting and Restoring Our Watersheds, by Brock Dolman (Water Institute, Occidental Art & Ecology Center www.oaec.org ):
As Brock puts it, “The critical head-waters (human brain)
are in need of an ego-restoration project” and the
“lifeboat in this restorative journey is our
watershed.” Poetically, our society must engage in a
“Reverential Rehydration Revolution,” by adjusting our
development and water management patterns away from the
“problem-causing system of: Pave it, Pipe it, Pollute it”
to a “solution-based system of Slow it, Spread it,
Sink it.” Hope lies in world-wide “water literacy”
and establishing a water management commitment
to the four R’s of “Conservation Hydrology:
Receive, Release, Recharge, and Restore.”
As Brock likes to ask,
“Do you know where your watershed is tonight?”
"Future Heroes" Superstruct:
http://www.superstructgame.org/SuperstructView/342
AND
"Everyday Heroes" Superstruct: Everyday Heroes Everyday people saving the world
"What You Study Grows" Superstruct: What you Study Grows! Energy goes where the attention flows!
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~~*
FUTURE HEROES: "Prepared in Body, Mind & Society"
From the website:
What is HeroCamp?
HeroCamp was inspired by a talk given at TED 2008 by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, the academic behind the Stanford Prison Experiments, on his new bookThe Lucifer Effect. Through his years of research, Phil has come up with the thesis that there is good and evil in all of us and it is bad barrels, not individual bad apples, that lead to evil acts. That is, most people will act according to the accepted norms around them. If it is acceptable to act racist, people will act racist, and so forth.
As Tara Hunt, one of the organizers of HeroCamp, listened to Phil, she was inspired to put the call out via Twitter that what we need is a gathering of Heroes that want to help create other Heroes in the world. This resonated with a large number of people who gathered over lunch at SXSW interactive 08 to discuss how we would approach this. HeroCamp is the result.
In fact, as Dr. Zimbardo points out in his studies, it isn’t only heroic teenagers who are in the minority - heroic people of all ages are in the minority. I drew out this diagram for Marina to show her what I meant by this:
Everyone else has the POTENTIAL to be heroes, but, for whatever reason, aren’t incited to practice heroism everyday. Of course, this larger group will act heroically when called upon, like in times of disaster or crisis, but, as Dr. Zimbardo highlights, the wrong conditions can also push this larger group to act like villains, such as in the case of the Rwanda genocides or in the Stanford Prison Experiments.
The goal of HeroCamp is to promote the idea of the ‘banality of heroism‘ - the idea that heroes are normal people, not people who totally sacrifice themselves for others, but speak out and act out when they see injustice, put their time and effort into making the world a better place and truly care about their fellow human beings. Thus, when situations arise that encourage evil, they will recognize them and call them out.
If I was to take that pie-chart and show my goal for HeroCamp, it would be that the sliver that represents Heroes grows to the majority of the population:
Of course, I would like to see the pie ALL BLUE, but I’ll settle for a majority for now. 
FOOT NOTE: This post is part of Superstruct ARG where you are invited to play yourself (not a fantasy character) in the Year 2019 in a finite live experiment which began on Oct 6 and ends on November 14, designed by Institute for the Future (games "for the public good"). Herocamp is happening in realtime.
www.superstruct.org
From Him To Her To Us: e pluribus unum... (Yes We Can, Yes We Can, Yes We Can)
STEALTH: the action of doing something slowly, quietly; (“No trumpets will sound….destiny is made known silently”)
COUP: A brilliantly executed stratagem; a triumph. A coup d'état .
Tell me one pundit who could have predicted Michelle in the
Oval Office in 2012, and in for an 8 year term.
And who would have thought, after such a long and weary road for women
that Michelle Obama would go down in history, not primarily as the first woman
(let alone black woman!) President
(though she was!!) but as the Presidential stealth
candidate; swept to power by the Airillions (grassroots groundswell)
Conscience
Coup.
Popularly referred to as the ‘whispering coup’, nothing happened until
the day it did. The citizens of the USA simply side-stepped the white noise of the
usual political campaigning, went to the polling booths and quietly e pluribus unum..; singly collectively voted
Michelle for President…. to follow her husband’s Presidency, succinctly
bringing about the most astonishing presidential election result in the entire
history of this young Democracy.
And, just as those 2012 voters were banking on…, the heady days of the Barack Obama “Yes We Can” Clan was well served by following up with a President M. Obama’s administration.
Barack and his cabinet did a superb job in his term; and he was more truly connected continent-wide to the pulse of the people through Open-government http://cairns.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/barack-obama-un.html - than any other President since the Founding Fathers. In the old way of thinking, there was no reason not to vote him in for a second term. But Destiny itself was being enlivened by the very success of Barack’s first term. This unprecedented Experiment in Democracy that had already taken a quantum leap was about to take not 1, but 2 more, as the Iroqouis Cenfederacy federal inquiry was set up on Michelle’s Watch.
In the event, the Obama’s serial Presidencies set the scene for something even more monumental and therefore the initial step; first Black President, slips even now, swiftly into an historical contextual mist as the Turtle Island Wisdom Keepers step from the shadows..
“We waited and watched where the shadows hung,
We knew for a thousand years you would come…”
Maybe history itself was waiting; just waiting.., for us to play out our Destiny. Did we institute some ancient rite of passage with our double vote of confidence, the one-two punch; good man, good woman….. so that finally, at long last, we could arrive at The 114th United States REGENERATIVE CONGRESS (2015-2017),
The 114th Congress was specifically charged in an historical referendum by direct consent of the electorate, to elevate the U.S. Constitution to its full potential by undertaking the noble task of identifying and incorporating the crucial missing components from the Iroquois Confederacy blueprint, which so profoundly influenced the original crafting of the Constitution.
As we tuned to these proceedings in our Halls of Power over these past months, I have become convinced that this is ‘The Great Work’ of our generation.
FOOTNOTE:
“The Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the "League of Peace and Power", and the "Six Nations” - In 2004 the U.S. Government acknowledged the influence of the Iroquois Constitution on the U.S. Framers.[14] The Smithsonian Institution also noted the similarities between the two documents, as well as the differences. One significant difference noted was the inclusion of women in the Iroquois Constitution, one group among many that the framers of the U.S. Constitution did not include.” Wiki
SHAPE THE FUTURE: http://www.superstructgame.org/Home1
Can you believe we spent ALL DAY sorting, blanching, cooking, canning...(Yes We CAN!) over-ripe tomatoes.
By tomorrow these tomatoes would have entered the realm-of-rotten so we were pretty darn pleased with ourselves.
What we've got now will see us through the winter but we also made a huge batch of pasta sauce and had an impromptu block party. It was a lot of fun and the sheer quantities reminded me of a story from long-ago, when we (local friends) were in the very early stages of helping newly migrated Mexican growers and pickers with their English language skills.
We knew these guys made such amazing tamales, sopes, picaditas, empanadas, flautas, gorditas,
Nopales burritos (ooh oooh).... on and on and on....(!) that we came up with what we thought was a brilliant idea; to have our 'students' teach us their wonderful recipes by telling us the ingredients, then we all bring the stuff to the next class and actually cook (with all the compelling small talk this entails)... And EAT... Everybody of course loved this idea.So the first volunteer began: "Take 28 eggs..." - We all started sending each other funny looks... some giggled..;she surely must be confusing her numbers, we all thought; she means something else. But no; this was the recipe, the way her mother always made it, the way all the mothers made their recipes..... enough to feed everybody in their tight-knit pickers community..
From that day forth "Take 28 eggs..." became our codeword for 'everybody matters.. everybody counts."
SUPERSTRUCT LAUNCHES OCTOBER 6, 2008. A finite Live experiment that ends on November 14th, 2008!!
PLAY THE GAME, shape the future AT www.superstructgame.org
How can you invent the future by playing an online game? Jane McGonigal -- Director of Game Research & Development at the Institute for the Future -- details your seven Superstruct missions... AND reveals the top seven Superstruct secrets to becoming an amazing player! So become a Superstruct expert in just seven minutes. Watch this video, and you're ready to play!
(Thanks to Creative Commons artist D-Brane for providing this video with a great soundtrack: the track "How to use a Timeship".)
So we were there...; at the Underground Railroad refugee dinner in the cave.. ~ just that we barely spoke of it since that night.. I don't think I spoke even to myself.. In a way it was a defining moment in what now seems to be a swiftly escalating in-our-face situation of displaced persons from LA who need 'refuge'... welcome.. warmth.. AND may be highly contagious. Our mute week since the potluck I know is because in effect we said Yes (to something huge). We meant it but we know we just put ourselves on some kind of third rail and that's kind of heavy.
Still, I don't want to lose sight of the fact that there was something warming for us too; finding in ourselves the wherewithal to show up, sharing (amazing) food with these others who had made a similar lone decision to show.We agreed it was wise not to really know too much about each other in the circumstances but it felt really good just to talk and listen and be heard and hear stuff. One guy said it's all so crazy, we should just open the borders.. I loved that he said that in the soft candlelight of the cave. It stayed in my head like a mantra. That there is one real guy out there who would do that if he had the authority, makes me feels better, even if he can't.. I said like Pangea Day when different nationalities sang the national Anthems of someone else's country; brilliant... Dearly beloved Arundhati Roy said that thing about National flags are to "shrinkwrap our minds while we're alive and drape our coffins when we're dead.."
So I look over at my fellow diner in the dark a hundred times a day..just to hear him say again; open the borders, open the borders, open the borders...So weird to feel relief from that amidst so much looming.
Footnote: this is a post for Year 2019 Superstruct - shape the future: Invent your future self.
Who will you be in 2019? Fill out your survival profile
to create your future identity. Remember: have fun, but keep it real!
Don't invent a fictional character. We want to know who you really
think you might be in 2019…
http://www.superstructgame.org/s/how_to_play
