TED Talk Monday

LOL – you will note that today is Monday, not Tuesday, the usual day for “TED Talk Tuesday” postings. I wish I could claim I just posted it today to confuse folks, but alas I’m not that clever – I just got my dates mixed up.  Whatever the case, enjoy this talk.

Fascinating!

Imagine you’re a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific. You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates — but each choice comes with a fearful consequence too. How do you choose? In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwgWkUIm9Gc]

Poet For the Planet, Drew Dellinger, At Occupy Oakland

It’s time to rock the nation, rock this occupation! Our communities need us. We are all leaders. How could we ask for anything less than the future?

A powerful video of the Occupy poem by acclaimed spoken word artist Drew Dellinger,  by award winning filmmaker Velcrow Ripper, set to the beats of Jef Stott . Shot at Occupy Oakland on November 2nd, 2011.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxvuU9BJem8]

More links:

Planetize The Movement

Occupy Love.org

A New Way of Looking at the World

Telephone sheep from the Frankfurt Museum of Communications
More Telephone Sheep from the Frankfurt Museum of Communications

2010 is fresh and sparkling new.  What better way to start it than by considering that there may be a new way of imagining our world?  These “telephone sheep” from the Frankfurt Museum of Communications take old dial-up phones and transform them into something completely different, something most of us wouldn’t have imagined when looking at a useless outdated phone.

We human beings have within us the ability to imagine a different world, as well as the amazing capacity to work towards creating it. I invite you to imagine a world where fossil fuels are used carefully, like the precious resource that they are;  a world with cleaner air and water; a world where those of us in the industrialized world don’t leave a legacy of pollution and destruction for those in the developing world, and our own future generations.

We do not need magic to change the world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better. ~JK Rowling, speech to Harvard Alumni Association, 2008

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men (sic) who can dream of things that never were.  ~ John F. Kennedy

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. ~ Albert Einstein

Thanks to my brother Jon for bringing the “telephone sheep” pictures to my attention!