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The EDGE
| Feature Article
One
Cultural
Creative's Journey through the Between
by Catherine Reid Day
For the past several years, I have been on a journey to discover that purpose for
myself and to encourage others to move closer to their own calling.
My story blends my discovery of The Cultural
Creatives (of which you will learn, I am a member) and the concept
of The Between -- with my understanding of the nature of the paradigm
shift we are living.
We are in the midst of a great societal and cultural shift out of the Industrial
Age into the Information Age, the Age of Knowledge. This shift affects us both individually
and collectively.
In her new book, Imagine, author Marianne Williamson calls what we are living "The
Bridge Time," and futurist John Naissbitt says we face, "a breathtaking
tipping point for our civilization and our planet...."
It is just as major a shift as it was for my European ancestors who left Ireland
and England to come find a new home in America. But our journey today is not so much
on the physical plane, as it resides in the way we approach our lives emotionally,
practically, spiritually, intellectually and morally. This journey requires us to
tolerate a level of ambiguity and patience with ourselves and others as we wander
through this undefined passage. This BETWEEN.
A metaphor: A story serves as a metaphor for what I mean:
A few years ago around New Years, my family and I were driving through Southern Minnesota
on our way to visit friends. We were near Harmony, MN, that part of the state where
you are not surprised to see the distinctive signs of the Amish. As we drove at highway
speeds, we overtook a slow moving black horse-drawn buggy with an orange triangle
of caution on its backside, moving on the shoulder of the road in the same direction
as we were. A lone man sat behind the reigns.
The day was sunny -- a high blue sky characteristic of a cold Minnesota day. The
temperatures must have been in the 20s or lower. The fields were bright white with
stalks of ocher corn poking through. We drove a few more miles (I did not keep track)
and came to a highway intersection, the spot where we would turn south toward Decorah
and our friends.
There, by the side of the road on the corner nearest us stood, alone, a middle-aged
Amish woman, dressed in traditional garb. I remember noticing her round hips and
shoulders, a heavy dress and shawl, maybe a hat and round eyeglasses, smooth ruddy
cheeks and a wide smile. In spite of the cold temperatures, it seemed to me she wore
no overcoat. Her hands were folded low to her waist. Kitty corner across the highway
sat another black horse drawn buggy with a lone man sitting behind the reigns, waiting.
I looked at the woman's face as we passed by and she looked at me and smiled. I waved.
As we turned the corner away from her, I realized that the buggy we had passed miles
back was coming for her. Even though it was far up the road and out of view, she
was patiently, cheerfully waiting for it. She looked unconcerned, not even cold.
Who knows how long she had stood there? As we drove away and she became a small speck
in my rear view mirror, I wanted to open my window and shout out to her -- "He
is comingl He is back there!"
But that need to know came from me, not her. She seemed unconcerned, confident, present
to the day. She stood with faith that whatever plan or prearrangement they had made
would be fulfilled. This between time would be crossed. As a friend once said, "Faith
is all about imagination."
Unseen beginning
Like that Amish woman, we are all living in a time with unseen beginning and end
points moving toward one another. We must have faith that they will meet up. We are
in the liminal and luminous moment of between; like the period of dawn, or dusk,
or the mid-point of the season -- eager to leave winter's sting and straining for
the first whiff of spring.
It reminds me of a friend who had been through a long period without dating, who
said, "If I had known it was going to end, I would have enjoyed it more at the
time."
We change agents are working toward something, something we think is new and different
-- culturally, politically, economically -- but we are not yet clear how it will
look or even if we will survive long enough to see it, ourselves and the natural
world through to the transformation. Art critic Suzie Gablick puts it succinctly:
"The question is no longer how did we get here and why, but where can we possibly
go and how?"
To make such a paradigm shift requires things of us. For paradigm shifts to happen,
someone has to attend to and reframe the questions. As long as the questions are
malformed then the paradigm shift cannot happen.
Voluntary commitment
The questions that I am working to reframe are related to what futurist Barbara Marx
Hubbard presents in her book Conscious Evolution where she says, "We proceed
not by default of birth, geography, class or background, but by the voluntary commitment
to evolve ourselves and serve the human condition."
She goes on to say, "The drive to co-create is rising as the need for maximum
procreation is declining. But society does not yet have the social or economic systems
in place to nurture and support the expression of this untapped creativity."
Her words have become a mission statement for me and have helped me in my work and
focus.
She has invited me to ask questions like:
• How do I both stay involved and at the
same time live a simpler more spiritually centered life?
• How do we nurture the untapped creativity in our people? How important is this
creativity?
• How do we shift our consumer habits so that we support the locally grown, the locally
made?
• How do those who have more share with those who are wanting?
• How do we cultivate and tend the space and resources necessary to unleash the "outside
the box" viewpoints that offer us the breakthroughs necessary for us to survive
and thrive?
My place
In this process, I have discovered my place among a newly defined
group as reported in the book, The Cultural
Creatives: How 50 million Americans are Changing the World,
by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson.
Ray and Anderson tell us that there are three main groups in America
today, three main cultures with three different sets of values:
The Traditionalists, The Moderns and the Cultural
Creatives.
The Traditionalists, roughly 20 percent of the population, stand for the very conservative
values of, say, a Pat Buchanan and believe the world is in deep trouble because we
do not abide by their beliefs. Based in values present in Medieval Europe, they came
into being here circa 1870. They stand for the return of the small town and a rural,
deeply religious America. They are troubled by the America they see around them and
keep themselves relatively separate as a cultural group.
Modernism began about 500 years ago in Europe and developed here around 1920; their
roots are in intellectualism, urbanism and industrialism and a belief in man over
nature. The moderns represent over half of our population and the mainstream of our
current political views. They are the dominant cultural viewpoint of our capitalistic
and consumer-driven country.
The Cultural
Creatives have roots in the esoteric spiritual movements that
grew out of the Renaissance and continue today in the rise of new
religions, the transcendental movement, the New Age movement, the
transpersonal psychology movement, ecology and social justice movements
and feminism, all of which began to flourish in the 1960s.
Cultural
Creatives' values are centered in a belief that it is vitally
important to do one's inner work. But, counter to the negative reviews
by some of the New Age movement, Cultural
Creatives are not content to leave that transformation or inner
work inside. They are committed to taking that inner work and bringing
it into community.
They believe in personal and social transformation, and in taking
that transformation outward in social justice movements, ecological
movements and feminism.
According to Ray and Anderson, Cultural
Creatives represent 25 percent of the U.S. population or roughly
50 million Americans. Notably Cultural
Creatives are 60 percent women, and the movement as a whole
appreciates "women's values of cooperation and compassion."
Quoting from the book: "The strength of the Cultural
Creatives is that they are the part of the population most likely
to carry forward a positive vision of the future. They have already
begun imagining and developing altematives to the urgent problems
that confront our world...the weakness of the Cultural
Creatives is that they don't yet have a basis for supporting
each other and working together. Lacking social support, social
isolation becomes a big problem for them. Until they develop a substantial
sense of community,
these fledgling movements, businesses and institutions cannot grow
and potential political leaders cannot create a common cause with
them."
Sense of hope
So the tension for the Cultural
Creatives is that they are not the dominant culture, and they
often are discouraged from their own beliefs and their own sense
of hope and new possibilities because they see themselves as a single
voice in a Modernist world view.
Ray and Anderson argue that if the Cultural
Creatives understood better that they are not alone or isolated,
that there are millions like themselves, they could turn and face
one another with a very positive view of the future and make substantial
social and cultural change. At their essence, Cultural
Creatives are about being FOR SOMETHING.
I am one of these Cultural
Creatives: I came of age in the '60s and '70s. I grew up on
peace and racial justice marches and working for Eugene McCarthy.
I helped support my brother's application to be a conscientious
objector during the Vietnam war. I fought my confirmation in the
Christian church because I could not stomach the way my gender was
seemingly inconsequential in the liturgy. I was catching a glimpse
of the alternative spiritual movements that would capture my spirit
later in life. My high school debate topic was advocating for what
later became the Environmental Protection Agency. I was introduced
to Planned Parenthood and activist feminism when I was 15.
While I was politically active, I also spent tremendous energy in my creative imagination
-- seeking ways to express it in the world. Based on some early formative experiences,
I adopted a belief that it was dangerous for me to freely express my creative self.
In fifth grade, I sculpted a bust of Julius Caesar and created a large story board
of information about the Roman Empire for an assignment. My teacher gave me an F
on the project because I ignored that she had given us a size limitation on the project.
The core message I took from that was that rules mattered more than creative expression
and going outside the box held harsh consequences.
This was the beginning of a tension between creativity and authority that has played
out over and over in my life and work. A tension that let me believe that there was
no room or few rewards for putting my artistic self into the world. It held risks
I was not willing to take.
It showed up again in college where I majored in creative writing with poetry as
my medium. I won writing awards and got to conduct an interview with Pulitzer Prize
winning poet Gary Snyder whose writing influenced me greatly, but my skin was too
thin for the assault of criticisms by the almost exclusively male faculty. Upon graduation,
I put the poet away and slipped on the skin of a strong communicator, a rather large
and hungry persona who discovered she was really a terrific "rainmaker."
Colleges and universities and public radio were eager for me to raise funds for them
and their thirst was unquenchable. I was very good at raising money for other people's
causes, other people's dreams. And they asked me to make it rain and rain and rain.
In time, my spirit was pumped dry. It was begging the question for me: What about
my own dreams? Was I being true to my authentic purpose...that encoded calling --
like a shell in the ocean, it will eventually wash up on the shore and be visible
again.
Divided lives
Parker Palmer, a former Beloit College professor, once said, "Movements
begin when people refuse to live divided lives." My body and spirit were screaming
at me that I was living a divided one.
Eventually I quit my well-paying and visible job in public radio, slipping off of
the ambitious clothing, the high heeled leather hard edge of doingness and moved
into the soft-edged ambiguity and risk-filled blur of beingness.
I went off to ask myself the question posed by Joseph Campbell: "How are you
going to relate to the system in a way so that the system does not eat you up?"
I went into the place Ray and Anderson describe as The Between: into my personal
puddle of anonymity, the place where you are nobody. Where you let go until you are
stripped bare and can pass, as in the story of Exodus, carrying nothing with you
so you can create a new story, a new future...into the place where I could get clear
just what I stand for and how I am manifesting my core purpose to "evolve myself
and serve the human condition."
That was just about nine years ago.
IIn this puddle
I want to share with you a bit about what I have discovered here in this puddle of
The Between. What I discovered was Camus' Laws of Happiness. There are four of them:
• love for another being
• Iife in the outdoors
• freedom from ambition
• creation
I am actively working on this Happiness Plan.
I enjoy an interesting and vivid dream life, and one of my favorite dreams serves
as a story of how I am pursuing this happiness plan.
I call it the dream of the dessert buffet. In this dream, I was walking through a
field and a forest and I chose the path to the dessert buffet. There I met some men
who were serving the desserts at the buffet.
The first one said, "Here is your plate," and he handed me a plate with
jello on it. I discovered that all the plates came with jello. As I walked along
the buffet line, more and more desserts, ones I did not care about or want, were
heaped on my plate. But I could see ahead of me my favorite dessert, cherry pie.
By the time I got to it, there was just a small space left on the plate.
The man dishing it out said, "You'll have to clear your plate first if you want
more cherry pie!"
What does this dream signify?
For me, the jello represents the playfulness of the child, perhaps my inner child.
I know that it is essential for us to stay connected our child-like aspects and natures
if we are to be joyful and creative.The heaping on of the plate was with stuff I
no longer wanted to do.
The cherry pie was my true calling, my artistic and creative self. If I wanted more
of that, I was just going to have to clear my plate.
My homeopath tells me that this dream is the key indicator to her of which healing
remedy I most need: a remedy for my habit of putting others' needs before my own.
In my persona as the rainmaker, that is what I was always doing. Putting others first.
This dream was asking me: HOW BADLY DO YOU WANT IT?
Well, I fell in love with my husband (who loves to be outside as much as possible),
we got married (love for another being), had a child (creation) and I started painting
(one version of the cherry pie). The happiness plan is beginning to take effect.
The part I am most challenged to let go of on this journey toward happiness is freedom
from ambition.
My next step
Another dream tells the story of my next step in this process: In the dream,
I was riding my bike down the middle of a busy street and as I traveled, I dropped
the yellow raincoat of responsibility I had been wearing. My husband came along after
me and picked the raincoat up.
My habit of over-responsibility was getting out of hand, and while it has always
been clear to me that my husband and I are soul mates, he was as much an under-achiever
as I was an over-achiever. From the time I first met him, he had been a school bus
driver. Over the course of our relationship, the balance of power was shifting and
I was moving more toward his relaxed and playful lifestyle and he was moving more
toward identifying what he is truly meant to do in the world and reaching his true
potential.
In 1998, we birthed a truly outrageous project. As a small child, he had experienced
the betrayal of a toy not living up to its advertised claims, and that served as
the seed for a new career path for us both. We dreamed up an idea for a wholly new
television show, and we decided to launch this national television show out of our
living room. The show is about TV commercials and our commercial culture, and we
were about to do it with no financial backers, absolutely no TV experience and not
a clue what we were doing.
The show, called Mental Engineering, looks at TV commercials from the viewer's perspective.
John Forde, my husband, is host. And we are reach over 41 percent of U.S. households
on 100 public broadcasting stations, including the big two: WNET New York City and
WGBH Boston. We also play in Peoria.
We have a great collection of rejection letters from people (Modernists perhaps)
who told us it could not be done, and a mountain of fan mail, including a generous
letter of support from Bill Moyers (identified by Ray and Anderson as a Cultural
Creative) who calls the show, "the most interesting weekly half hour of social
commentary on television."
We are currently in talks with a couple of major funders for the show, and with a
big time television entity that may want us to develop some new projects with them.
We are very excited and full of hope.
What I stand for
Armed with the knowledge that I am a Cultural
Creative, I am much clearer what I stand for now: It is my belief
that, as artist Hazel Belvo says, "if everyone would do their
art, it would save the world."
So I am busy working on doing my art, on encouraging my husband in doing his art,
playing with my daughter to do her art, and facilitating others as they do their
art.
Today, I am working on this theme in three ways:
• I am committed to my own creative expression
which is painting, and
increasingly, writing again.
• I work with others on manifesting their creative expression That means consulting
with and facilitating organizations like Kulture Klub and Forecast Public Art, Planned
Parenthood and with a new local arts crawl called Arts Off Raymond...and on teaching
creativity and expression classes that allow me to mentor others in the fine art
of manifesting their own creative expression.
• And by developing Porcupine Productions (the producer of Mental Engineering) and
its television shows.
What I stand for as one of the Cultural
Creatives is a belief that in personal creative expression there
is salvation for the world. l believe that we humans must allow
ourselves our heart-felt creative expression or risk the violence
of unhappiness.
Our primary task as humans is to travel our own, singular, very personal journey.
Yet we are not alone. There are people and guides to assist us on the journey. And,
like that Amish woman, we are invited to stand, face and accept what comes, when
it comes. We simply must pack light and travel with our hearts and our true selves.
And not give up hope.
There is a tree in the Mediterranean that is all about faith and process. There is
a date tree that requires a full 80 years to bear fruit. It is an act of true faith
and generosity to plant such a date tree, for the planter is unlikely to be around
once it bears its fruit.
For those who do not understand the tree's process, it may take so long for it to
bear fruit and the tree appears so barren that it seems the tree is near its death
and should be cut down.
But if you understand the process required, you will patiently await the fruit of
this tree's process. It will bear fruit -- sometimes you simply have to patiently
wait and believe.
Catherine Reid Day is a mother,
painter, writer, teacher, consultant and head of a television production company.
She worked in higher education as a manager and fund raiser, including time as deputy
head of development for Carleton College, VP for development for Macalester College,
for the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota, and for Public Radio
International. She owned her own organizational consulting practice for eight years.
In her life as a painter she serves as a mentor in the Women's Art Registry of MN
Mentor program. She has just won a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation for this
work. Two years ago she founded Arts Off Raymond, a new art crawl in the Midway area
of St. Paul. She teaches classes on creativity and personal creative expression and
coaching.
Contact her at (651) 690-4250 or by email.
Copyright © 2001 Catherine Reid Day
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