"Now Voyager sail thou forth to seek and find" W.W.

I feel the season shifting. It happened today. Although I still have a healthy amount of time to restore and renew before the school dance begins...I feel the great wheel turning once again. O that I were able to be at the sweet community of cooks and fire dancers! I am on the sea witnessing super pods of atlantic Dolphin and Humpback whales in a mad dance of a scale I cannot describe. The fire dance images thrill me and I imagine playing with fire as a cleansing and renewing elemental dance.

I wish that Summer Seminar could contain some of these vital community building componants. We must gather and bring the fire dance to our people!

In the words of the author of one of my desert island books THE POETICS OF SPACE:

"Fire is more likely to smolder within the soul than beneath the ashes"

-Gaston Bachelard

there are bees and hives, and flames and dancers

Image from the gathering my barn dwelling hosted a few weeks back. Talk about network intelligence... a loose structure of events and a big board of jobs for folks to sign up for (some as deputies, others as worker bees) such as Chief Kabob Consultant (who pounded the turmeric and saffron into the marinating paste and oversaw the chopping of choices for threading) and Kabob Threaders (a team of 8 who approached their job with creativity and speed, preparing food for 120 guests and wore their luridly yellow-stained hands with pride 2 days later). A flexible structure with a few simple rules: 1. Introduce yourself 2. Sign up for a job 3. No spectators. So much more transpired and was accomplished and performed and created than one person could possibly imagine. And somehow the culture makes it safe to take risks... which I think is very important. It works and it is humbling to behold and be a part of. Above and below, a glimpse at but one offering by a guest made to the opening-evening talent-show... a dance of swinging ingots of flame! Start thinking about your cog in this big, complex machine... I expect you all to attend next year. (photo courtesy dustin goodwin)

The US Military Do It

From the Atlantic Monthly, September 2007: "The Plane That Would Bomb Iran" by Robert D. Kaplan. Just replace "conflicts" with "challenges" and "attack" with "arts-in-education intervention" ... insert teachers, administrators, and teaching artists ...

"... in future conflicts conventional assets like the B-2 and fast-attack submarines would be used in tandem with Predator drones, Special Forces A-Teams, and Marine Corps platoons.

... Such operations would require an exponential increase in complexity -- a greater variety of assets used in quick, symphonic offensives.

... Think of bees swarming together in a hive, and then flying off again ... That's the military formation of the 21st century -- lots of small joint air-land-sea configurations that combine instantaneously for a big attack and then separate out just as fast.

... The issue is no longer what an A-Team, or a submarine, or a Predator, or a B-2 bomber can do on its own; it's how these assets can be used in combination to leverage one another."

The Wilderness

I think about the wilderness beneath me as I swim the sea...especially at night. I did a large series of paintings that were meditations on a wilderness experience... elegant blue and black sumi ink fins on 12" x 12" wood squares...look like shark but meant to be Bluefish. I was swarmed by feeding Bluefish while midnight full moon kyaking...the water boiled around me...I made these paintings for almost 6 months beacause of this experience. I was thinking about how many of us yearn for a brush with authentic wilderness..but safe and clear of danger. Like viewing sharks from the Pope Mobile. Wow Mike, you had a brush with the real deal. Wilderness contact. Perhaps it was a Silkie...just as well you swam to shore..humans cannot dwell for long in that domain.

Safety in Numbers ... or the Lack Thereof

Great posts! I'm reading and re-reading!

So while out surfing yesterday morning I was nudged -- well, my surfboard was, and roughly -- by what I believe to have been a sea-beast. Likely a shark, but I prefer not to dwell on it. I quickly counted the legs in the water (four, including mine), and, the odds not being in my favor, splashed my way to dry land. Now, if there had been a large network of surfers in the water, or some boogie-boarders, maybe a field trip of school kids, the likelihood that I'd be shark food would have been much lower, and I could have stayed out there and enjoyed the waves. Just another tidbit of evidence supporting the network over the lone individual.

Dime-Store Alchemy

Are You Ready, Mary Baker Eddy?

...written by Charles Simic (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/02/books/02poet.html) about the art of Joseph Cornell...

Andre Breton says in the second surrealist manifesto: Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and fututre, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradicitons."
That point is somewhere in the labyrinth, and the labyrinth is the city of New York.

Self-Organizing Systems & Dissipative Structures

I found this great book in a used bookstore back in the summer of 03 and have been chewing away on a number of chapters, revisiting annualy. This marks my 4th visit (took one year off) to The Web of Life, by Fritjof Capra. It had a pretty cover; I couldn't help myself. So chew on this -- -

He summarizes three characteristics of "self-organizing systems" --as, "we can say that self-organization is the (1) spontaneous emergence of new structures and new forms of behavior in (2) open systems far from equilibrium (aka. those that have a constant flow of energy or matter going through them - like any living being), (3) characterized by internal feedback loops and described mathematically by nonlinear equations." He elaborates, "The striking emergence of new structures and new forms of behavior, which is a hallmark of self organization, occurs only when the system is far from equilibrium." I liken this to when I have WAY to much to do - and somehow, in all that chaos, I ramp up into a better more efficient mode of juggling and accomplishing. Or you could liken it to water flowing down a drain... once that drain system is overwhelmed by too much water, much greater pressure and movement... only then does the little trail of a super-organized and efficient whirlpool/vortex appear, enabling the water to move more quickly down the drain.

"thus natural selection may favor and sustain living systems "at the edge of chaos" because these may be best able to coordinate complex and flexible behavior, best able to adapt and evolve" (attributed to Stuart Kauffman, a evolutionary biologist in the 1940s, but related to Ilya Prigogine's interest in dissipative structures and the puzzle of how living organisms maintain stability and their life processes under conditions far from equilibrium).

now I need to go find some more approachable wisdom like the amazing Hawley finds in in the car ads in Martha Stewart Living.