Bookish

I’m writing a book!

Ok I’m not really writing a book.

I’m editing a book. And designing it. And illustrating it. Along with my partner in crime, Joos van den Dool.

We’re making a work of art.

We’re crafting an invitation to the world. An invitation to host transformation. Your own, and then after that, maybe other people’s.

 

We’re running an Indiegogo campaign to support the book! Check out our awesome video: igg.me/at/artmonastery2013

Art Monastery Italia is representing Italy in the International Partnership for Transformational Learning (formerly known as the Lifelong Learning Partnership). This is a huge honor and one of the most inspiring programs I’ve ever been involved with. We were awarded this grant from Grundtvig a year ago and we complete it this summer. The other partners are listed on previous blogs.

We decided, as a Partnership, to publish a book. And I just about leapt out of my skin to volunteer to be in charge of it. It’s a bit of an undertaking, but the results have great potential.

The book will be a collection of personal stories. The stories of the founders and staff and students and workshop participants of the organizations in the Partnership. The book will reveal the deeply personal nature of transformation and offer examples of how this has happened in real people’s lives. It’s quite a lot. My fingers get tingly just thinking about it. How does one change the world? One heart at a time. And you always, always have to start with you own.

I am awash with gratitude. I am grateful for the Art Monastery, for the ways that it has shaped me more than the ways I’ve shaped it. I am grateful for the Partnership, and the transformations I experience at every single one of our gatherings (without anyone trying to host anything!). I am grateful to be amongst such blazing hearts as those of Charles and Liz, who every day fire emails back and forth about how we’ll plan the programming for 2014, how to fix the internet connection, and the latest Joseph Campbell quote. Such deeply caring, brilliantly creative spirits. I am grateful for this book for bringing me into the very nest of the juiciest, most powerful stories I could immerse myself in and for creating an opportunity for me to use this book as a vehicle for my own artmaking.

Collaboration, people. It’s just the future. We are deeply social organisms. Get over it. Collaboration is the only way through the portal. So let’s do it!

The book will be published and available summer 2012. Estimated retail cost $15. Stay tuned.

“The world is facing huge challenges, and they are growing daily in severity, scale, and complexity. It is no exaggeration to say that they are not going to go away. Indeed, they will get worse, unless we start to find solutions, and we find them soon.

If we are going to survive, we desperately need the next generation to be smarter, more adaptable, and better prepared than any that has gone before. Our only chance is to improve the way we teach our young, to equip our young people with the skills and the attitudes that might steer this world of ours to a far safer place than at present looks likely. The question is: Is that what our current education system does?”

—from the film We Are the People We’ve Been Waiting For