Having been raised on Atari, television, and neighborhood football games, this weblog format is a strange thing to me. Being educated on mostly books--but, yes, we had a few Commodore 64s--has prepared me for success in an obsolete medium. With that as a background, I had to ask myself, "What is the point of this blog?"
I've never been much of a fan of self-disclosure for its own sake or just in response to the internal motivation to share. I was raised in a basically Pennsylvania Dutch culture to keep my mouth shut, work hard, and do the right thing. Not my culture, my parents, my friends, nor my professors or bosses in various jobs offered much in the way of guidance that felt applicable to me. But each of these has been foundational.
After all that, I can say that the point of this blog is exploration. Because there are no predetermined comprehensive answers to globalization (or any other emergent process, really), blogging is a suitable medium for us to work on the process of progress. My interest, my business, and my vocation, then, is personal and cultural innovation. I use "innovation" because I do not believe that a generation raised on MTV expectations will settle for some sort of bland "progress". I know I won't; I want to live an innovative life.
If you haven't already decided how you want to interact with this site, maybe I can give some sort of structure by sharing how I interact with this site. This is an opportunity to me to communicate. Rather than focus primarily on publishing, on sending information, my interest is dialogue. If I could design a sense of global progress on my own, I might. But some processes are so complex and, well, WOW!, that it takes input from a lot of different people in different places. So, along with Emily taking the reins in this endeavor, I set this up to listen. Communication goes at least two ways.
I'll list a few of the chronological steps that led up to the presentation of this site, and maybe that will help people see where I'm coming from--for those who are interested.
Basically, Visions of Little Consequence: Towards a Postmodern Apocalypse describes what I was going through in my early twenties. It's autobiographical fiction, but the Afterword section describes in a straightforward manner what I wanted, what I was trying to share. The blog here is set up to fit with a few of these chronological stages in my thinking and writing, and it is my hope that this listing of chronological stages may help someone.
Part of what is curious to me is how motivations and ideals change over time. Looking back now, "Visions" seems idealistic and maybe a little extreme or thin (certainly unpolished), but genuine. It was helpful to actually put words to some of these experiences which I found challenging.
After putting together a personal narrative, the next step in writing was to focus on poetry. Just as the stages I use in my essays are largely based on Ken Wilber's work, the poetry I wrote after finishing "Visions" was largely reliant on Rumi's work. Writing poems gave me a little more freedom in focusing just on momentary experiences, rather than trying to tie things together--as with "Visions". The poetry was a way of exploring love and personhood.
When I felt satisfied with what I'd done with poetry, I wrote Creation Moment. I had this feeling of breaking out of something and breaking into something else. Cultural studies helped get me out of my own mind, and I wrote what seemed to me to be an approximation of a generic creation myth. As I was writing, I had the feeling that this is also an analogy for what occurs in every moment of experience, that what is described in this piece is constantly occurring neurologically and phenomenologically in each and every one of us. (When I say "satisfied with what I'd done", I don't mean to say that any of my writing is necessarily good, but I was satisfied with really getting into the interaction between self, world, and divinity or openness.)
A few years ago, as I realized the impulse to write poetry had faded significantly, I started putting together the concepts and heuristics that ended up in essay form. This was my collected attempt to make sense of all these things that did not seem clearly said, these things that I believe need to be understood. My feeling is still that, although there is a lot of interacting processes, as a group, we can handle it.
This weblog is the next form, a unique step which may signal the end or diminishment of me writing essays on my own. I wonder where it can go. I'm sure the next form for me is not individual, so I am grateful to Emily for sharing in this endeavor and happy to have whatever feedback comes from whatever sources. While I have been accused of being an optimist by some and an intractable cynic by others, I don't believe it, I don't believe we are that locked into attitudes or perspectives. I am sure that global development is an emergent process, not something that can be designed, and I am sure that the way we go about it will be fascinating. There are phenomenal amounts of dangers and difficulties, and incredible opportunities for forwarding the human spirit as well as improving the human condition. I believe we are moving into an understanding and method of communication that allows us to base our progress in conceptual understanding and then move into communicating appreciation for our lives and the diversity we encounter, further moving into inspired interactions with our environment and with one another. I invite all criticism in the spirit of enjoying realism, reality, one another.
Copyright Todd Mertz