VOF Week 1: (We Are The Bridge)

Sandra Dean-Marlowe

Burning Bridge

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Tags:

• art
• bridge
• co-creation
• community
• connection
• music
• technology
• vision
• world voice
• writing

“Web 2.0” is expanded consciousness and co-creation – at both virtual and actual levels – in realtime! The internet over the past decade has opened up the world in ways we have only just begun to envision and explore. Just as entire industries, governments, corporations and “operating systems” have been challenged, expanded (and sometimes overcome) by this new global intimacy, so are we at the personal level now able to connect with people from many corners of the world, many of whom we may never meet face-to-face. Yet we possess technology that makes possible the intimate exchange of enlightening, educational, and mind-bending conversations – a flow of information back and forth, creating a bridge. This is tremendously provocative and interesting to me, and inspires a renewed sense of hope in the quality of life, in a truly egalitarian world, and a better humanity.
I deeply value personal and spiritual growth, education, and exploration. I have a thirst for knowledge and a deeply curious mind about the worlds we see as well as those that we cannot. Gathering information and experience has always helped me understand situations, people, challenges, and set personal and professional goals and aspirations accordingly. Behind much of my art, music, and writing is a deep desire for connection – the meaty, soul, gut stuff. A stronger word might be communion. And I seek bridges between cultures, identities, ages, sexes, groups that make spiritual values like peace, love, kindness a reality in my life. The basis for being able to do that for me comes from ever-broadening my experience and frame of reference. It means hands-on understanding and assimilation/integration/application of that new information, to both inner and outer landscapes of my life. Although the speed, intensity and volume at which new data comes at us now is daunting, I am thrilled to be alive in this age!
To apply a Christian reference, all of us on the Tower of Babel are beginning to speak to each other - across the classes, across the genders, across the boundaries and gaps that have caused separation from each other. With such grand technology available today, and the ability to share perspectives, knowledge, and wisdom, we can grow into new solutions to (or perceptions of) not only our more immediate personal problems, but also evolve into life-altering, more inclusive and healthy solutions for an entire planet. That our community now includes the world, in a much more experiential and literal way, is tremendously exciting and almost breath-taking to me. I feel those of us present on the planet at this time hold an almost-sacred trust or responsibility to the new paradigm that is unfolding. We are the bridge to a new world voice, to new places of empowerment, to an achievable peace, to a sustainable planet. Web 2.0 "communities" offer us all the opportunity to be co-creators in that new vision for our world.