Eating whole and healthy foods are an important part of starting our day. Some of them even come from our own garden in the backyard. Others come from the local farmer’s market, one of the many in one the fastest growing economies in America. Our daughter went to the neighborhood school that we helped start with a group of parents who were interested in fostering an education embracing a diverse background of cultures and religions, embodying a holistic form of education that includes mind, heart and body unity, not just the rote learning of the tradition school system.
My husband is from Norway. Even this fact, I believe speaks to the real beginnings of a wisdom culture where international and inter-racial unions are the norm and not the exception. He is an expert with working with his hands and can fix anything that can be taken apart and put back together again. His joy is to work in the building where he is building engineer designing and implementing green systems and recycling procedures.
At this point in my life I am working for a pre-professional ballet high school. Combining the academic and artistic fields the school embodies the paradigm of an alternative education system recognizing that intellect without emotion and will is deaf and blind. My current responsibility is to help develop a curriculum for the life of the child to embody a unity of these areas demonstrating the beauty of the human spirit through a unified mind and body reflected in the dance form of ballet.
Our daughter is about to graduate from college with a degree in biomedical engineering. Her first project was to solve the problem of one of the aging dams holding back the mighty Mississippi River. As other engineering students struggled with imagining ways to support and enforce the outdated structure, our daughter came up with an original solution. Gradually relocating businesses and families who lived in harm’s way, she let the structure wear away, for, as she said, “The River will eventually go where the river wants to go.”
These very personal examples, I believe are the necessary foundation for and beginning evidence of the wisdom culture to come. Of course, I believe that on a larger level the whole energy consumption/production model will be revamped as we turn solar, wind and ocean current energy into usable form. In fact, much of the technological expertise and awareness is already in place just waiting for the right time for this to happen. A similar situation can be seen throughout the world in one city or another in the area of transforming cities, transportation and industry. Bill McKibben reports in his book, Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth of the dramatic changes even the poorest of cities have already provoked by thinking outside of the box, another sign of these emerging times. Changes in downtown areas, rapid transit, and creating a community that feels responsible for the public arena around which they live and earn their livelihood are also evidences of an emerging wisdom culture.
As for politics and religions, I can only imagine that the grassroots movements that have been the precursors of the social and political human rights movements that many of the “Cultural Creatives” belonged to and participated in, will continue to be relevant in developing “home churches” or small group encounters and action groups. These groups will be centers for discussing and practicing different forms of spirituality or involved in taking responsibility for various aspects of running an effective and prosperous community. This is when knowing our strengths and our passion is important, for each individual, no matter how insignificant, will be a unique and invaluable piece of the whole puzzle that makes up this emerging worldview.
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